THE FIRES NEXT TIME TRANSCRIPT - Boise State University8:30 AM KEYNOTE ADDRESS: Stephen Pyne,...

THE FIRES NEXT TIME

TRANSCRIPT

THE FIRES NEXT TIMEDecember 7, 2000

Boise State University

Boise, Idaho

Presented by

The Andrus Center for Public Policy

The Idaho Statesman

c 2001 The Andrus Center for Public Policy

Thursday, December 7, 2000Boise State Unviversity, Student Union

Boise, Idaho

S C H E D U L E

8:15 AM WELCOME: Margaret E. Buchanan, President and Publisher The Idaho Statesman

8:20 AM OPENING REMARKS AND INTRODUCTIONS: Cecil D. Andrus, Chairman The Andrus Center for Public Policy

8:30 AM KEYNOTE ADDRESS: Stephen Pyne, Arizona State University, Tempe Professor of Biology and Society Programs, author of a dozen books, including Fire in America and Worldfire 9:00 AM FIRE SCIENCE PANEL: Moderated by John Freemuth, Senior Fellow The Andrus Center for Public Policy

Ross Gorte, Congressional Research Service, Washington, D.C. Senior policy analyst at CRS, a Ph.D. in forest economics, an expert on the economics of wildfire prevention and suppression Robert Nelson, University of Maryland, College Park Professor of Environmental Policy, a Ph.D., author of five books on public lands management and property rights, an expert consultant on using market options to solve resource management issues Leon Neuenschwander, University of Idaho, Moscow Professor of Forest Resources, Ph.D., nationally-recognized expert on fire and restoration ecology 10:30 AM STAKEHOLDERS PANEL: Moderated by Marc Johnson Board Member of the Andrus Center for Public Policy, partner in The Gallatin Group

James B. Hull, Texas Forest Service, College Station State Forester, Director of the Texas Forest Service, and Chair of the Fire Committee of the National Association of State Foresters

Darrell Knuffke, Vice President, The Wilderness Society, Washington, D.C. Vice President for Regional Conservation, experienced in western resource issues from both the land agency and environmental perspectives

Brad Little, Little Land and Livestock, Emmett, Idaho Owner and operator of a farming and ranching operation in southwestern Idaho, well known for his ability to work with everyone around the table and to articulate the cause of responsible use of public lands Jaime Pinkham, Nez Perce Tribal Executive Committee, Lapwai, Idaho An effective negotiator, a respected consultant, a trained and eloquent spokesman for resource issues on Native American lands

James S. Riley, Intermountain Forest Association, Coeur d’Alene, Idaho Executive Director of IFA, articulate speaker, consultant to members of Congress on issues that advance active resource management compatible with environmental stewardship

THE FIRES NEXT TIME

Jim Smalley, National Fire Protection Association, Quincy, Massachusetts Senior Fire Service Specialist, Director of the National Wildland/Urban Interface Fire Program, former manager of a national technical assistance program for the U.S. Fire Administration

Gary Wolfe, Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation, Missoula, Montana President and CEO of RMEF, Ph.D. in wildlife biology, a respected leader on issues affecting wildlife management

12:30 PM LUNCHEON: Speaker: Richard T. Gale Chief of Fire and Aviation Management, National Park Service Jordan Ballroom, BSU Student Union2:00 PM POLICY-MAKERS PANEL: Moderated by Marc Johnson

Larry Hamilton, Bureau of Land Management Director of BLM’s National Office of Fire and Aviation, former BLM State Director for Montana and the Dakotas, a Ph.D. from the University of Denver

Dirk Kempthorne, Governor of Idaho Current Chairman of the Western Governors’ Association, former U. S. Senator, former mayor of Boise Lyle Laverty, USDA-Forest Service Regional Forester, USFS Region II, 30-year veteran of the Forest Service, recently named to head the implementation of the Forest Service’s national fire plan Marc Racicot, Governor of Montana Currently serving his second term, the governor has achieved statewide popularity and a national reputation for his progressive approach to issues involving use and management of public lands Mike Simpson, U.S. Representative Second-term congressman from Idaho’s Second Congressional District, member of both the Agriculture and Resources Committees, a 14-year veteran of the Idaho Legislature, three-term Speaker of the Idaho House

Tom Udall, U. S. Representative Former Attorney General, currently Congressman from New Mexico’s Third Congressional District, member of the House Resources Committee, member of a distinguished political family 3:30 PM QUESTION AND ANSWER FORUM: Moderated by Cecil D. Andrus and John Freemuth 4:30 PM CLOSING REMARKS: Cecil D. Andrus

THE FIRES NEXT TIMEThursday, December 7, 2000Boise State Unviversity, Student Union

S C H E D U L E , c o n t i n u e d

THE FIRES NEXT TIMEThursday, December 7, 2000


Boise, Idaho

CONTENTS

WELCOME: Margaret E. Buchanan, President and Publisher . . . . . . . . . . . Page 1The Idaho Statesman

OPENING REMARKS: Cecil D. Andrus, Chairman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 2Andrus Center for Public Policy

KEYNOTE ADDRESS: Dr. Stephen J. Pyne . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 2Professor of Biology and Society ProgramsArizona State University

FIRE SCIENCE PANEL: Dr. John C. Freemuth, Moderator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 8Senior Fellow, Andrus Center for Public Policy

Panelists: Dr. Ross W. Gorte, Senior Policy Analyst . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 9Congressional Research Service

Dr. Robert H. Nelson, Professor of Environmental Policy . . . Page 11University of Maryland

Dr. Leon F. Neuenschwander, Professor of Forest Resources . Page 15University of Idaho

QUESTION FORUM: Dr. John C. Freemuth, Moderator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 17

STAKEHOLDERS PANEL: Marc C. Johnson, Moderator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 20Andrus Center Board MemberPartner, The Gallatin Group

Panelists: James B. Hull, State Forester . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 21Texas Forest Service

Darrell R. Knuffke, Vice President . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 21The Wilderness Society

Brad Little, Owner. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 21Little Land and Livestock Co.

James C. Smalley, Senior Fire Service Specialist . . . . . . . . . . . Page 21National Fire Protection Association

Jaime A. Pinkham, Executive Committee . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 22Nez Perce Tribe

Dr. Gary J. Wolfe, President and CEO . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 22Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation

James S. Riley, Executive Director . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 23Intermountain Forest Association

QUESTION FORUM: Marc C. Johnson, Moderator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 23

LUNCHEON ADDRESS: Richard T. Gale, Chief of Fire and Aviation . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 40National Park Service

POLICYMAKERS PANEL: Marc C. Johnson, Moderator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 46

Panelists: Dirk Kempthorne, Governor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 46State of Idaho

Mike Simpson, Congressman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 47Second District of Idaho

Tom Udall, Congressman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 48Third District of New Mexico

Lyle Laverty, Regional Forester . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 48USDA Forest Service, Region II

Larry Hamilton, Director of Fire and Aviation . . . . . . . . . . . Page 49Bureau of Land Management

QUESTION FORUM: Marc C. Johnson, Moderator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 50

CONCLUSION: Cecil D. Andrus, Chairman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 61Andrus Center for Public Policy

BIOGRAPHIES: . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Page 62

CONTENTS

(continued)

CECIL D. ANDRUS: This year, a tragedystruck the western United States with thetremendous destruction of the range and forestlands by the wildfires in western America. That’swhy the Andrus Center at Boise State Universityand the Idaho Statesman came together to bringyou here today. It’s a pleasant surprise for aformer politician to join up with a newspaper.Usually, they lie about you all during yourpolitical career–well, depends on where you sitand how you’re looking at it, I admit–and theydon’t tell all your finer points every day. Now,however, I’ve been out of politics for a longtime, we have a new president and publisher ofthe Statesman, and perhaps I’ve mellowed justa tad.

Now I have the great pleasure of introducingthe publisher and president of the IdahoStatesman. Margaret Buchanan came to us fromElmira, New York where she was the presidentand publisher of the largest newspaper there.She received her B.A. and M.B.A. in finance fromthe University of Cincinnati. She is an out-standing administrator and has been a majorinfluence in the changing of the direction of theStatesman. She is here to welcome you and to getus started.

When Margaret came to town, she and her husband Greg and their two sons imme-diately became a part of the community. She gives of her time to serve on the boards of many community organizations, includingthe Chamber of Commerce, Fundsy, theShakespeare Theatre, and the Y.M.C.A. She is anactive member of this community and anoutstanding executive of the Idaho Statesman,Margaret Buchanan.

MARGARET BUCHANAN: Thank you,Governor. Good morning and welcome. TheIdaho Statesman is really privileged to be able towork with the Andrus Center for Public Policy toorganize this conference today. We haveprovided the forum, but the day is about you.We are so pleased that you have come togethertoday from many perspectives but all with thesame goal in mind: to honor the heritage of ourforests and our unique communities and toleave them all healthy for the future.

This fire season, though difficult, did give usa unique opportunity to find some commonground. Today, we hope to take advantage ofthat and set an agenda for the nation. We willcompile the recommendations of this con-ference into a white paper, and we will forwardthat to the next Administration, whoever thatmay be.

Your conversations today are very crucial andvery important to the issues we’re going todiscuss. I’m really inspired to think you have allcome today to talk about this issue because thissummer was a very challenging summer for thestate of Idaho, to see all of the land that burnedup, land that we all use and love and recreate inand utilize. So I look forward to listening andlearning from you today because these issues arerelatively new for me, not being westerner andnot having to deal before with forest fire issuesas you do when you live out in the west. I lookforward to a great day and a great discussion andto seeing some good things come out of theactions today.

So thank you, and, Governor, I’ll turn it backto you.

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Boise, Idaho

KEYNOTE ADDRESS

Dr. Stephen J. PyneProfessor of Biology and Society Programs

Arizona State University

CECIL D. ANDRUS: Thank you, Margaret. I’dlike to add the welcome of the university to allthe participants. Let me make a couple ofintroductions. It’s my understanding that theSecretary of State for Idaho is here, PeteCenarrusa. He is our oldest elected official instate government. We also have with us today agentleman who traveled here from Montana tobe with us, Bill Tash. He is a senior member ofthe Montana Legislature, and Montana sufferedsome of the devastation we did.

Let me tell you a little bit about his honor,William Tash. I knew him in Korea when he was19 years old, and we called him Wee Willie Tash.I won’t tell you any of the stories because hemight reciprocate. All of mine would betruthful, but he would lie. He was a tin bender,and when our airplanes got beat up, he putthem back together. Now, all of a sudden, I findthat cowboy from Montana wearing a neck-tie and a suit. He has the same curly hair I have, and I’m pleased he is with us today. Bill,stand up.

We also have with us Tom Steger, theCongressional Fellow in the office of Congress-man Tom Udall, who is unable to be with ustoday. Tom has been called back into duty as aresult of the indecision in Washington, but hewill join us later today via satellite. Please standup, Tom. I’ve known the Udalls from Arizonaand New Mexico for many years, an outstandingpolitical family. Tom and I crossed swords a fewtime. He was Attorney General in New Mexico,and he was very sensitive because I wanted tosend the nuclear waste from over there in thedesert by Arco to Carlsbad. He’s such a narrow-minded fellow, and he gave us a lot of grief. So Isupported his candidacy for the Congress of theUnited States to get him out of the AttorneyGeneral’s office in New Mexico, and it worked.We are hauling some of that stuff to New Mexicoright now.

On the back of your program are the spon-sors. We’re a 501(c)(3), and that means that webeg for the funds to keep afloat. If you have anopportunity, please thank them because theymake these conferences possible.

In your packet is a booklet, Policy After Politics.This is a white paper we published after the Juneconference, prior to all the fires. There are sixrecommendations in there. We hope you willtake a look at it and see where some of thoserecommendations or proposals will fit in to anew Administration when they are discussing

the policies governing the public lands ofAmerica. The rangelands and the forest lands of the western United States provide us ourlifeblood from a recreational and industrialstandpoint. We need to make some changes. Iparticularly would like to thank Boise Cascade,who paid for the reprint of this white paper.Take a look at it.

Let me now introduce to you our keynotespeaker, Dr. Stephen Pyne, who is with us thismorning. He is Professor of Biology and SocietyPrograms at Arizona State University, an experton fires, and a prolific writer. We can’tunderstand where we are going if we can’tunderstand where we have been and how wehave arrived at this point. Dr. Pyne has made alifelong study of fires from the beginning oftime, and while he was working his way throughthe university, he fought forest and range fires inthe southwestern part of the United States. Ithought we had to start with an historicalperspective this morning, and he is the perfectone to start us out. He has the knowledge; he hasthe history; he has no axe to grind. We’refortunate to have him here, and we’ve set up atable in the lobby to allow you to buy one of his books. With that, let me present to you Dr.Stephen Pyne.

STEPHEN J. PYNE: Good morning. It’s myprivilege and most daunting task to explainfrom the perspective of history how a fire seasonlike that of last summer could occur and how wemight respond. If I could have the slides on...

In truth, there are many fire problems inthe west, and it’s useful to disentangle them. Wecan appeal to many stories to explain them. Isay “story” advisedly because the creation and perpetuation of a story is, in fact, part of the explanation. I will argue that the need for anew kind of story will be part of whateversolution results.

I’m going to suggest three large narratives: anindustrial narrative, an imperial narrative, and anational or American narrative. These are dif-ferent because part of the situation we’re in isthe result of the fact that the United Statesindustrialized. We have similar kinds of fireproblems and relationships to all nations thatare industrializing. The world is, in fact, dividingalong those lines.

There are also problems that result from thefact that we have public lands. This is part ofwhat we can call an imperial narrative. If you

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look around the world, what cognate countrieshave similar fire problems? They are places likeCanada, Australia, Russia, South Africa. Theseare all countries that had a similar history,which allowed them, for a period of time, to have vacant land. We have large wild-land fires in the United States because we havelarge wildlands. That is a different story than the industrial story, but the two, of course, will interact.

Then we have a national or American story.How is it that these and other events cametogether in the United States to create aparticular kind of fire scene? That is the result ofaccident, history, politics, of course, and manyother factors. What we see today is the result,the crystallization of that long historical process.

We often hear the phrase that fire is a tool. Itis a tool, but it’s also something more. It’s a very odd tool. Think of a candle, for instance. Aflame sits on a candle taper the same way thatan ax head sits on a handle. That’s a tool. Butthere are other ways in which we use fire, waysthat are more like a domesticated animal, muchmore like a milk cow or a sheep dog. It takes itscharacter from the context around it. It is bred,it is trained, and it is almost the origin of oursense of domestication. That’s a very differentkind of relationship.

Then there is another sense in which we usefire in which it is much more like a captiveanimal, much more like an elephant or a trainedbear. We can use it, and we rely on the propertiesthat are, in a sense, bred in the wild, but weredirect them for different purposes. We use it inall of these cases, and in fact it exists on its own,quite apart from us. But how industrializationwill affect those different kinds of fire tools andwhat that means turn out to be quite different.

This picture is a map produced by satelliteimage and published a while ago by NationalGeographic. This is the section of the worldlooking over Africa and Europe. The red spotsare fires that result from burning biomass; thewhite and yellow are electricity, the lights ofcities. They are from burning fossil biomass.From a history standpoint, when you beginburning fossil biomass or processing it, it beginsin odd ways to replace and to compete withliving biomass. The world, in fact, is dividinginto these two huge combustion regimes. Thereare very few places where the two co-exist, andthat, I suggest, is probably transitional. Thenortheastern United States looks very much like

the European scene. Parts of the west look like adifferent mix.

This picture represents an important part ofthe story. In 1880, the census produced a map offorest fires in the United States. There it is. Someareas were not forested; hence weren’t recorded.Some areas were not yet settled, so they weren’treported very well. If you read the text that goeswith this, you realize the United States in the1880s was pretty much like Brazil in the 1980s.The response was very similar. This was anagricultural society that relied on fire for almostall of its functions, but it was beginning toindustrialize, and we’re seeing the collision.

There was a lot of extravagant fire, abusivefire. In a survey of the forest, one cartographersaid the scene was magnificent but it was tooextravagant even for Americans. Somethingwould have to intervene to stop the process ofsimply burning over everything everywhere. Weknow that process was interrupted. It wasinterrupted because of a great historicalaccident. For a short period of time, much of thewestern United States was vacated. Theindigenous people were gone or removed intosmall reservations, and yet a new wave ofsettlement had not yet arrived. At that particularpoint, we begin setting aside lands for the“common wealth” as permanent public domain.That interrupted the process, and that’s why wedon’t look exactly like either Europe or Africa.We have a chunk that was permanently setaside, land that would not be subjected to thosesame processes.

The map on the bottom shows different stateswhere experiments were tried. What do they dowith fire in this? One of the chief arguments forsetting the areas aside was to protect them fromfire, but what model was appropriate. No oneknew. This was a new invention. They had noreal idea how to go about it. Interestinglyenough, a century ago, the state of New Yorkwas probably the most prominent candidatebecause it had been setting aside areas in theAdirondacks, the Catskills, as well as dealingwith the rural fire problem. The state model, notthe federal model, in a different scenario mayhave turned out to be the key.

The bottom one is a little hard to see, but oneof the oddities of reserving the land in the westis that this area is very fire prone. The uppermap is a map of lightning-caused forest fires.The bottom is a map of thunderstorms, that is, amap of lightning. And they are not the same at

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all. The only place where there is any overlap issouthern Florida, which, as we all now realize, iscertainly anomalous in fire as in anything else.

What you need is a pattern of wetting anddrying. That’s the geographic basis for fire. Itmay come annually; it may come over longerrhythms, but you need that. Then in the west,you have a pattern of relatively dry lightningbecause of topography. So we have a chunk ofthe world where nature is going to burn thingsif people don’t.

You have now set aside an area. It is not goingto be converted to farms and towns. You’regoing to have to manage it. You’re going to haveto do something with regard to fire because ifyou don’t do it, nature will do it for you. Thechoices are basically to convert that area intosomething that doesn’t burn or to do theburning yourself. But at the time, that was notthe obvious choice. The first of the experimentsin controlling it was actually Yellowstone Park,and it became effective in 1898 when theCavalry took it over. The military model was thefoundation for federal fire protection. In someways, we have not found a way to transcendthat. Certainly as we began setting aside forestreserves, everyone looked keenly to the Army asa cheap and reliable source of firefighting.

This picture reflects again an internationalexercise. The man on the left is Dietrich Brandis,who created the British Imperial Forest Servicefor India and established a basis for what to dowith large reserved lands. This model waspropagated throughout the British Empire, andit was copied in fundamental ways by theUnited States.

This quote is from Gifford Pinchot’s auto-biography in which he said he hoped to dosomething in this country similar to whatBrandis had done in India. This is part of theimperial narrative. I realize that is a loaded term,but we’ve been experiencing globally over thelast fifty years a de-colonizing process. Thesurvival and character of the public lands aregoing to be the most fundamental parts of thestory of what happens to fire in the U.S. Whathappens is that forestry here, as in many otherparts of the world, claims priority, and we begina national story in 1905 with the Transfer Act,which carried these lands to the national forests.

If any of you have read any of the stuff I’vewritten on the history of fire, you know that Itended to divide it off into twenty-year blocks,beginning in 1910. There were certain problem

fires that defined the year and gave it acharacter, and this works out very nicely. We’rein the midst of one of these, which has to dowith the mixing of wildlands and fragments ofcities, but it’s possible to conceive this history inmany ways.

I’m going to suggest a different organizationhere, one that deals with defining stories. Itactually works on a thirty-year cycle, beginningin 1905 with the creation of the national forestsas we understand them and the search for somekind of appropriate fire protection regime. Thenby 1934, another crisis develops, this time inIdaho, and the response to that reinforces thatstory in 1935. By the mid 60s, there is anothermajor reexamination, and thirty years hencebrings us to the 94 fire season and to the crisisthat we enjoy today.

One of these surprising events in looking atthe early fire history is that it was fundamentallypolitical. The catalytic event, to the extent thatwe have a founding one, emerged out of 1910,and that was a deeply political era. It began withthe firing of Gifford Pinchot for insubordinationand led ultimately to the resignation of RichardBallinger, the Secretary of Interior. Theircontroversy split the Republican Party, and theylost the election of 1912.

The fires were seen as a test of competingpolitical philosophies, competing senses of whatto do on the public lands. These were large fires;they burned over 5 million acres in the nationalforests, a little less than 3 million in thenorthern Rockies. 78 firefighters were killedinitially, and the Army buried 88 bodies. Theywere completely overwhelmed by thecatastrophe and the trauma of the event. Shortlyafter that, to show the politics, the Weeks Act,which allowed for the expansion of the nationalforests and, by implication, that model ofconservation, broke out of the Congressionallogjam within six months and was passed.

But there was, in the midst of all this, a majorcontroversy about policy, and there was acultural context that I think is worth spending aminute on. Not everybody died out there. EdPolaski, a 40-year-old ranger (That’s he to theright with his crew) managed to get his crewinto a mine shaft and had to hold them at gunpoint to keep them in as the fire storm passed.Six members of that crew died; the rest lived.Polaski later invented and promoted a fire tool,and if you go over to the Fire Center you will seea statue of a firefighter holding a Polaski. That

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story is deeply embedded in the culture. All the people on the scene in 1910

considered it a rout and a disaster. They werecompletely blown away. The Forest Service hadbeen spending about $40,000 each year overbudget, fighting fires, and in 1910, they spend$1 million. That would be like us todayspending $15 or $16 billion. The whole thingbecame a major crisis. But Polaski’s story and thestory of others as they moved up the food chainportrayed them as gallant fighters that had notbeen given the resources they needed, mostly bythose miserable western politicians, who refusedto support the Forest Service appropriately.

It turned out that the same month as the bigblowup, we had a controversy that hit majornewspapers and even Sunset magazine. It arguedthat the whole approach was wrong. What theU.S. should be doing was to copy the Indian wayof managing the forest, and that was by lightburning, controlled burns. Indeed, if we did this, we would not have these big fires. This isa sample of what the burning looked like in California.

In effect, everything that is now beingpromoted as arguments in favor of prescribedfires was there on the ground in 1910. Theproblem was that Secretary of Interior, RichardBallinger, also liked light burning. So suddenlythe choice of whether to fight fires or light firesbecame a part of that controversy, and thesuccess or failure of the great fires will be seen asa political test of these men and their competingphilosophies of public land management.

So a story that might have been a technicalstory became a personal and political story. Aswell, light burning will be fought to the deathby the Forest Service. An entire generation willbe profoundly traumatized by the fire, and theywill see any evidence of fire in the woods assomething that they should extinguish.

Also in August of 1910, one of our greatphilosophers, William James, one of thearchitects of pragmatism, published his lastgreat philosophical work, a short essay calledThe Moral Equivalent of War. James was alarmedat what he saw as a growing militarism, not onlyin the U. S. but in Europe, and wanted to findsome way to redirect that energy to constructivepurposes. So in the same way that there could bea mechanical equivalent of heat, could we nothave a moral equivalent of war? He decided yes,and the way to do it was to unite against theforces of nature. We would have a national

conscription of youth, and they would begin acollective war against our common enemy innature. There it is, being played out in theNorthern Rockies. Even as he speaks, he dies. At the end of 1910, the smoke from the firesturned the skies over Boston and New England acopper color.

The moral equivalent of war has remained,folded into the Polaski story and the othertrauma of 1910, to give us a founding narrativethat we have, in some ways, not yet tran-scended. This was the first great crisis faced byPinchot’s successor, Henry Graves as ChiefForester. The next three chiefs, up through 1939will personally be on the fires. The great fireswill affect this entire generation, not unlike thelong march did Communist China. It will stampthem; they will refer to it constantly. This will bethe standard: They will not allow it to berepeated. So to the best of their abilities, theyextended this philosophy. The question is howfar can you push it into the back country.

In 1934, after a series of very large fires, somein the Selway, there was a major review by theForest Service of its policies. What should theydo with these fires? And this led to a majorreview in Missoula, and they decided that theyshould either try to put them all out or, it wasproposed, just leave them alone. It was widelyrecognized by everyone on the scene that theland was in worse shape than it was when the Forest Service took it over. Whatever theywere doing was not working. How should they respond?

There were a number of biological andcultural critics coming to the fore, and in 1935,the Chief Forester, Gus Silcox, who had been thesecond in command of the northern region in1910, announced the “10:00 AM Policy,” whichsaid “We will fight every fire and suppress it by10:00 AM the next morning.” He had the entireforce of the Civilian Conservation Corps and thecivilian army behind him; he had all of thepresidential enthusiasm he could want; andthere was sanctuary. There was one huge surgeto fight fires. He was going to replay the fires of1910, and this time, he was going to win.

World War II produced a further nationali-zation and demonization of fire. The 10:00 AMpolicy and its prescriptions continued untilroughly the mid-1960s with the passage of theWilderness Act. We were going to redefine someof the character of the public domain; we weregoing to have to conceive of a fire policy suitable

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to it. This begins a major debate and a revisionof the debate as to what policy is appropriate.This picture is a record of burned area. You cansee that the purple is the unprotected area. Aswe moved more and more land into protection,the amount of fire plummets. If you think aboutthis ecologically, we were removing fire thatmight want to be there, but this was a very suc-cessful program. The yellow is the cumulativeburned area; the green is the cost. Yes, there issome inflation coming into this, but it wascosting more and more, despite better scienceand better equipment. We were not able to keepa lid on fire as we should.

So there were economic costs. There wereecological costs. The land was changing. Fire canbe just as effective removed as applied. There isno neutral position on fire in these lands. Sothere are reasons to try to reverse that olddebate, to take the other side, to try to reinstatefire into the landscape. For a period of time, wemade the experiment. I’ll talk about Yellowstoneseparately if anyone is interested, but I think theera continued until the next thirty-year break,which is in 1994. The 94 fire season was largeand lethal, but it had something that manyothers had not: It had a book behind it thatcreated a cultural context for understanding.Norman McLean’s book gave people whootherwise had no connection to fire a prism bywhich to interpret it. So the Storm KingMountain fire and the fatalities associated withthat could be understood as a replay of MannGulch, and suddenly there was a culturalconnection—not simply a policy connectionbut, if you will, a poetry connection throughwhich people could become interested. Thisbecame a catalyst, and it seems to me we are stilldealing with the consequences of that.

Let me spend just a minute on this graph oftwo alternatives. The graph on the top showsburned areas in the western national forestsfrom 1940 to 1994. You can see an increase overthe last twenty years. It doesn’t seem to want togo away. It used to be you had big fires whenyou had dry years. Now we can have big fireyears unless it’s wet and suppresses it. Thebottom one is a graph of a wildlife refuge inCarolina. They had a wildfire problem, and theybeat it down. Then they realized they needed toput fire in; they did. With aerial ignition, theyare now burning almost three times as much bycontrolled burning as they suffered fromwildfires initially.

What’s interesting is that, apart from thescale, the shape of the two graphs is the same. Ifthe U.S. had it to play over again, we would haveopted for the bottom road on those lands whereit is possible–not all forests are amenable to thiskind of manipulation–but what you have isessentially the same. We were unable to do thatfor whatever reasons, and now we are left with arising tide of fire.

That brings us up to the current debate. Whatare the problems? There are many fire problems.We have a fire problem in wilderness androadless areas that has no technical solution. It’sa cultural decision, a political decision, adecision that has to be made. Nature gave thetask to us; we can’t just hand it back. I think wehave to accept that and act as best we can. Wehave a problem with the interface–I like to call itthe inter-mix–but that is a solvable problem andhas solutions. This is a really dumb problem tohave. This can be fixed. You simply have tochoose to fix it.

We have problems with ecosystem health,which is much murkier and more difficult. Thequestion is that we seem to have a maldis-tribution of fire here–too much of the wrongkind, not enough of the right. There are all kindsof other issues dealing with global environmen-tal concerns, not the least of which is climatechange. We’re talking about sequesteringcarbon, trading that for our emissions from cars,but now we’re going to start removing carbonon an enormous scale over tens of millions of acres. That is going to complicate the issuesconsiderably.

So the debate continues. What we have is notthe same series of contexts we had in 1910. Idon’t think that context will probably ever berepeated. What will happen this year? Whoknows. It may not be unlike the election andjust go on and on and on without a clearresolution. The sense is that a big fire willproduce big results. That’s absolutely nonsense.We’ve had big fires that did absolutely nothing.We’ve had lots of crews killed and burned over,and we went absolutely nowhere. There has tobe some larger cultural connection; there has tobe appropriate political context. The politicalecology of fire is such that you have a year toplant. It’s a lot like slash-and-burn agriculture.You can plant in the ash and have somethinggrow. If you wait a year, it’s pretty tough. If youwait three years, it’s gone. You have a very shortperiod of time in which to transfer this.

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What I think is missing, if I look at thecomparison with 1910, is the story. It’s theequivalent of the Polaski story, and I’m notarguing for someone to go out and pull a gunand order somebody in a fire situation to dosomething. I don’t want to see people killed. Itmay not even be one person. But there has to besome event, something that can be convertedinto a story. It’s not a problem of policy; it’s a problem of poetry. It’s a need to have aconvincing story for ourselves and for the larger public as to what we are doing and why it matters.

I have some difficulty with the term “restora-tion.” I won’t bore you with that now, but Ithink that locks us into an ironic narrativebecause you never really restore it. I wouldprefer we had a different term and think aboutwhat we would like instead.

Let me suggest that fire takes its characterfrom its context. Fire is something thatsynthesizes its surroundings. If you havemessed-up landscapes, you’ll have messed-upfires. It is not strictly a fire problem; it is aproblem of land use; it’s a problem of politicaland intellectual culture. Fire will act onwhatever is out there, and it will be effective ornot effective, depending on those contexts.

What were the causes of the fires lastsummer? They were a mixture of nature andpeople as they always have been. How does itcompare to 1910? If you’re a realist, you’ll saynothing will happen, but unfortunately, historyisn’t made by realists. It’s made by people whobelieve in the future, believe that something canhappen and act accordingly, and that is what isunresolved. Part of that will have to be theinvention of some parallel story to 1910, or wewill be forever locked in this para-militarycliche. We deserve better; the land deservesbetter. Our relationship to fire over which we

have a species monopoly is far more complexand nuanced than that, and we can do better.

What can we learn from history? How manydays do you want to be here? In some respects,we can learn nothing from history, but I thinkwe can also learn some lessons about being site-specific, about separating different problemsfrom the whole. We can learn a degree of mod-esty and accept that there are going to be nouniversal solutions, that it’s going to be anongoing negotiation between ourselves and theland in which we live, and that fire is going tobe the medium of that discussion.

ANDRUS: Thank you very much, Doctor, forthat interesting and enlightening historical viewof where we are today and how we got there.Next will be the science panel, and I’ll introduceDr. John Freemuth in just a few moments. Butlet me point out that you have cards with yourprograms, so if you have questions, write themon the card. The ushers will pick them up, andwe’ll handle as many of those questions as we can.

I think there is an agreement this year thatsomething has to be done, that the guns need tobe checked at the door, that the enviros have toquit fighting with the timber people, and thecowboys have to quit fighting with everybody.There has been a tremendous amount ofpublicity about fires we call “forest fires,” but ifyou look at the fires this year, we’ve had anequal number of disastrous range fires. I’mlooking forward to hearing what the scientistssay about the cheat grass in August that is soexplosive and about what would happen if anold cow ate it in the spring when it’s green and then got off the land. Would it still be that explosive? I don’t think so, but that’s apersonal opinion.

CECIL D. ANDRUS: Now I would like tointroduce Dr. John Freemuth. He is the seniorfellow for the Andrus Center for Public Policy atBoise State University. He’s a tenured professorand heads up the political science and publicadministration area at Boise State University. Heis chairman of BLM’s National Science AdvisoryCommittee, which Pat Shea put together threeyears ago. He has produced many publications,and I enjoy working with him. He will introducethe panel, and we’ll go from there.

JOHN C. FREEMUTH: I’m from an academicdiscipline that is so secure about itself that itcalls itself “political science” as if that makeswhat we do more scientific.

I thought Dr. Pyne’s initial remarks werewonderful and showed the importance ofhistory in understanding where we’ve been.These questions are really not technicalquestions; they’re political and analyticalquestions. Dr. Pyne, you said that we need astory. We do, and maybe we’ve dumbedourselves down now so that the only personwho will tell us that new story is Smoky the Bear.Perhaps he can get the message to the Americanpublic that things have changed because people

might pay attention to Smoky if he decided totell us something other than “Only you canprevent forest fires.” This is also, ironically, theplace where Secretary Babbitt announced thechange in approaches to fire in Interagencywork, right here on campus, right here at thispodium. Many of you were here for theSecretary’s announcement in 1994.

Also Dr. Pyne would like to chat with all ofyou at the break about some of his messages, butplease, he’s already been asked 350 times, “So,what are you going to do with our footballcoach?” Don’t ask him about football at ArizonaState. He’s already tired of that conversationhere in Boise.

It is my distinct pleasure to introduce threepeople, and we’ll have them go one afteranother in the order that their names appear onthe program. Then, if there’s time, we’ll get toquestions from the audience. These are folkswhose work I’m aware of, work I read. I find itexciting to have them all here in the room at thesame time.

The first person is Ross Gorte from theCongressional Research Service. If you want tofind out, in these reports to Congress, aboutnatural resource policy dilemmas, you’ll find his



Boise, Idaho

FIRE SCIENCE PANEL

Dr. John C. Freemuth, ModeratorSenior Fellow, Andrus Center for Public Policy

Dr. Ross W. GorteSenior Policy Analyst

Congressional Research Service

Dr. Robert H. Nelson Professor of Environmental Policy

University of Maryland

Dr. Leon F. NeuenschwanderProfessor of Forest Resources

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name on most of them. You can get a lot ofthese on the web, and he’ll tell you how to dothat. Remember, he works for Congress, so youcan’t push him too far on these things. We’d liketo thank John Hoehne from Senator Crapo’soffice, who made the request to get Ross outhere to talk to us today. He’s very influential andhas written many wonderful things aboutnatural resource policy from fire to water topublic lands.

He’ll be followed by Bob Nelson. Bob hasworked in Interior and is now a professor at theUniversity of Maryland where he has one of thesweetest deals I’ve ever seen. He only has toteach every other semester. If anyone from BoiseState is here, his is a good model to follow. He’sa wonderful writer and has written a great bookon the role of economics in modern society. It’sgreat stuff, and I use it in my work a lot. Bob andI will continue a little of this tonight onDialogue, a program on public television. We’lltalk about what came out of the day. His latestbook uses fire as an example of why he calls forthe abolishment of the U. S. Forest Service.

Finally, it’s also a wonderful pleasure tointroduce someone I’ve worked with. It showsthat the universities in Idaho can work together.Dr. Neuenschwander from the University ofIdaho is one of the nation’s pre-eminent fireecologists, has testified before Congress, and cangive us a lot of wonderful insights about whatwe can and cannot do from his discipline’sperspective on fire.

So with that, I’ll sit down and turn it over toRoss Gorte to begin the conversation.

ROSS W. GORTE: Good morning, I’d like toextend my thanks to the Andrus Center and theIdaho Statesman for inviting me here today. Thisis a topic of great concern to many people,including a lot of members of Congress, and it’sbeen an issue to me personally for a long time.

Before I begin, let me talk briefly about whatthe Congressional Research Service is, what wedo, and how we do it. CRS is part of the Libraryof Congress, and we provide information andnon-partisan analysis for the members andcommittees of Congress. Hence we areessentially professional critics. Interest groupsand agencies propose solutions to variousproblems, and we look at these solutions,emphasize the limitations, and the potentialunintended consequences of those proposals. Asa result, we are naturally skeptical of proposals,

so my comments here today should be taken inthat vein. I’m a professional skeptic, and I don’tbelieve anything anybody says, generally.

I’d like to start by talking about fire effects,mainly because that’s what my dissertation wason, so I know more about fire effects than a lotof other areas. Also, the whole reason we getinto this issue of fire protection and fire controlis that we want to avoid damages. We don’t doit just because fires are burning but because theyare doing something we don’t want them to do.

I’d like to begin by noting that the standardmeasurement in reporting forest fires is acresburned, sometimes acres consumed, acresdestroyed. Those latter two terms are not accu-rate. We do not lose any acres whatsoever whenthey burn. The surface changes, the top fewinches of the subsurface change, but the acresare still there. They have not been consumed byanything. The biomass has been consumed.“Acres burned” is generally not a very usefulmeasure because damages are not proportionalto acres. They are related to intensity, the flamelength, various other unmeasured characteristicsof fires, and the extent of each of those factorsspatially and temporally.

We do not do a very good job of measuringdamages from forest fires. I’d like to note thatecological damages are typically overstatedbecause, first, burned areas look devastatedimmediately following a fire even whenrecovery is likely. For example, there is generallyno tree mortality if the crown scorch is 60% orless. 60% looks like a pretty badly burned tree;yet those trees generally recover.

The second factor in why ecological damagesare often overstated is that fires burn less than100% of the area within the perimeter. Wild firesare patchy. For example, in the 1988 fires inYellowstone, within the perimeter of the fire,only about half of the acres burned was in crownfires. Another third was in surface fire. One-sixthof the area wasn’t burned at all. So when peopletalk about a million or two million acres inYellowstone having been burned, that overstatesthe reality. A lot of that wasn’t burned or wasburned lightly.

The third aspect of this is that conflagrationsin stand-replacement ecosystems like lodgepolepine and aspen are normal. Preventing stand-replacement fires may cause greater ecologicaldamage than are caused by the fires. It is unclearat this point whether silvacultural treatmentsprovide an adequate substitute for stand-

replacement fire. Nonetheless, fires do cause damages that are

of concern. That’s the reason we try to dothings. The first and foremost aspect we look attoday is property, especially houses. Wildfireconflagrations in the urban/wildland interfacedo a lot of damage to property. I’ll talk moreabout that a little later.

We’re also concerned about the off-siteimpacts, particularly on watersheds and airquality. In watersheds, we can get erosion,sedimentation, mass soil movement, and floods.With air quality, the concern is particulatesbecause smoke from today’s wildfires does put alot of particulates into the air. Nevertheless,there is also research that documents that theamount of particulates we’re getting fromwildfires and from prescribed burns today isonly about a third of what was being put intothe atmosphere before European settlement ofthe west. If we do a lot more prescribed burningin the future, we’re going to have a lot moresmoke. That’s a guarantee. You can’t haveprescribed fire without smoke. We’ll see smokelike the kind you saw this summer, only it willprobably be in the spring and the fall whenprescribed burning takes place.

The third concern about damages is theecological impact of stand-replacement fire infrequent-fire ecosystems. We don’t know whatthe future ecology will look like in those areas.History is a poor guide because stand-replacement fires in frequent-fire ecosystemswere rare before white men intervened. That’s agreat concern. We don’t know whether we willget back those frequent-fire ecosystems orwhether we will get back something that hasnever been seen before.

Let me turn now to talk about fuelmanagement. There are basically three tools thatare commonly used: prescribed burning,commercial timber sales, and other mechanicaltreatments, including potential new uses forsmall and medium-sized materials. You willprobably hear more about that from Bob Nelsonin a little bit.

These tools are not good substitutes for oneanother. They are complementary. What youcan do with a prescribed burn, you cannot dowith a timber harvest. Likewise, what you cando with a timber harvest in terms of protectingan area, you cannot do with a prescribed burn.These are not substitutes. They arecomplementary tools. You have to use all of

them in various ways and in various settings,depending on the site.

The second thing I want to raise is that theseare likely to be very expensive. Traditionaltreatments cost a lot. In 2000, the U. S. GeneralAccounting Office estimated that it would cost$12 billion over the next sixteen years to treatthe areas of national forest lands that wereconsidered at high risk.

This is probably significantly understating thereality for three reasons. First, in frequent-fireecosystems, it’s not a program that’s going toend. It’s going to go on forever. Thus, it isn’t a16-year program; it’s a permanent program totreat these lands. Second, the Forest Serviceestimate of acres at risk has risen more than 20%on their own land, and we’ve finally begun toidentify other federal and non-federal lands thatare at significant risk. Third, we’re likely to be alot more careful and spend a lot more onprescribed burning after the escaped fire in LosAlamos this year. There may be new uses thatoffer ways to cut the costs, as I’m sure Bob willallude to, but I’m skeptical about the ability ofthe federal government to create markets and to become a reliable supplier over time, parti-cularly in light of the generally low levels oftrust among the industry and environmentalcommunities with the way the agency worksand with each other.

Let me turn to the effects of each of thetreatments and combinations of treatments. Wedon’t really know, on a broad scale, how thosetreatments will affect forest fires, either acresburned or damages. Why? First, fires are patchy.The intensity across the burned area variessignificantly, depending on the micro-conditions at the time. It depends on the site,the aspect on the slope. It depends on fuelconditions: the load, composition, structure,and moisture content. It also depends on theweather conditions: the humidity, tempera-ture, solar radiation, and especially wind speed and direction.

So fires do not burn consistently, whichmakes the results of a fire difficult to predict.Second, it’s difficult to do forest-fire effectsresearch. Wildfires are not well-suited forresearch because we don’t know the a prioriconditions, i.e. what it was like before the firestarted. Prescribed fires are typically not verysuitable for doing fire effects research becauseburning conditions are necessarily restricted.Fires in laboratories are feasible, and we have an

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excellent facility in Missoula to test these, butthey are not very good at reproducing thecomplexity of field conditions.

The last option is experimental wildfires, butsomehow I think that experimental conflagra-tions are not going to be politically feasible.Hence the effects are often based on modelsfrom expert opinions and on anecdotes, incontrast to case studies. However, many fireexperts believe-–and must believe in order to dotheir jobs effectively–-that catastrophic fires canand should be controlled. Thus their views maywell be biased, overstating the effectiveness offire control efforts.

Despite fuel management programs, confla-grations will happen. As long as there is bio-mass, drought, wind, and a fire ignition source,conflagrations will occur at least occasionally.They are rare but not unprecedented even infrequent-fire ecosystems with restored naturalfire cycle. Few fires that occur becomeconflagrations, only about one percent onaverage, but predicting which fire is likely tobecome a conflagration is difficult because itdepends on a host of factors that we don’t knowvery well. The effects of fuel treatment on thelikelihood, on the damages, on the ability tocontrol conflagrations is largely unknown.

So, what do we do? Well, there are roles andresponsibilities for governments at all levels aswell as for individual land-owners. For thefederal government, one priority, obviously, is toprotect their own lands, which includes theappropriate level and mix of fuel and othervegetative treatments and an appropriate roadsystem, “appropriate,”of course, being definedpolitically.

Another role is to disseminate information, tolet other government agencies and the publicknow about what is being done and what can bedone. The federal government has a role inproviding financial and technical assistance forappropriate protection of non-federal lands. Thefederal government also conducts research andsupports research on the effects of wildfires andon the ways to reduce damages before the firesoccur and after the fires occur. Last, the federalgovernment can and does need to provide someform of appropriate assistance after catastrophicfires occur.

State governments have the responsibility forprotecting state and private lands within theirboundaries. States are generally responsible forproviding adequate transportation systems and

for regulating the insurance industry to ensureappropriate fire insurance requirements onindividual homeowners in conjunction with theappropriate federal relief and disaster assistanceprograms, whatever those systems are. The statescan also contribute to the information exchangeon what can and should be done, and they cancontribute to the financial and technical aid forprotection of individual lands.

Local governments have a couple of impor-tant roles in protecting areas from wildfire also.Local governments are responsible generally forzoning and for controlling land use. Theyregulate the urban/wildland interface to theextent that there is any regulation on that. Howlocal governments deal with local land use caninclude how they deal with access, requirementson water supply, information, assistance, andincentives. Local governments are also responsi-ble for building codes and fire codes, and thesehave a significant impact on burnability of anindividual house. Local governments can do alot to protect individual houses if they chooseto. Whether they choose to do this byregulation, by providing information, or byproviding incentives is also a local decision.

Finally, private land owners, individually and communally, have some responsibility.Individually, they must take responsibility fortheir own property. They must learn what thethreats are and what they can do about them.Research has shown that in excess of 90% of houses can survive catastrophic wildfires (a) if they have non-flammable roofs and (b) ifthe homeowners clear flammable material–vegetation, firewood, outdoor furniture, etc–forten meters around the structures. Ten meters isnot very far and is typically within their ownproperty boundaries. They also should find outwhat government programs exist to provideboth financial and technical assistance in theirefforts. In addition, landowners can cooperatewith their neighbors and with their state andfederal government agencies to reduce thethreat through ensuring adequate access,available water supplies, and fuel reductionwhere appropriate.

Thank you.

ROBERT H. NELSON: I’m very pleased to behere. I think this is an extremely importantsubject. It could well be that when we look backon the year 2000, the fires of 2000 may notmatch the fires of 1910 in terms of influence on

future land management, but it could very wellprove to be a landmark year for the public landssystem and for the Forest Service.

As John suggested, I’m going to focus some ofmy remarks on the Forest Service. I think thatsome of the problems that we have are lessproblems of technical knowledge about fire orcauses of fire and more institutional andpolitical. They are policy problems about how toget things done. I think the Forest Service is atthe center of that, and we need two things.Stephen Pyne said we need a better story. TheForest Service has been one of the main storycreators in this area. Smoky the Bear was one,and the fires of 1910 were another.

We also need a better management capability.Without leaving the substance aside, we haveactually, as a result of the fires, reached somedegree of consensus that the basic problem wasthat we had excess fuel buildups on the forestsout there. There were a number of warnings ofthe potential for catastrophic fire, and the firesof the year 2000 to some extent were arealization of those warnings. We ended up inthis situation with basically tinder-box forests,as they’re called, as the result of managementdecisions, suppression of fire especially by theForest Service over many decades, and failure toact in the1990’s.

Now what are the options that we haveavailable? One is prescribed burning. That’sbasically going in and removing the excess fuelsby setting fires or allowing natural fires to burn.Another is mechanical thinning, whether it’scommercial or non-commercial is an importantquestion. The third option is to do nothing. Youcould call it the let-it-burn option. We’ll get ridof the wood eventually. If we don’t do anything,it will burn, and we’ll have more fires like thefires of 2000.

I would claim that for the last ten years, notby conscious policy deliberation exactly, weopted for the let-it-burn option. As the result of the management systems we had and ofdecisions made at the national level, very littleaction was taken. It’s not that this was a situa-tion of ignorance because we knew about theproblem. In effect, we de facto said let it burn.

Now why is that? That gets me to my subjectof the current condition of the Forest Serviceand to some of the stories it tells and that we tellalong with it. I think the Forest Service has beenexperiencing difficulty for some time with itsmanagement systems. I would trace it at least

back to the 1970s. I’d say it has had adysfunctional land-use planning system. Everytime you try to cure it, the cure seems to turnout to be worse than the disease so that we’venow reached a point of almost total gridlock inland-use planning decision-making in the Forest Service system. The Forest Service hadtremendous economic problems. Probably theleading natural resource economist of the lastfifty years, Marion Clawson, once said in Sciencemagazine that the Forest Service’s economicpractices were disastrous. It made all the wronginvestments. It responded to political incentivesrather than economic. From the economicperspective, it was about the equivalent of anEastern European steel mill around 1980. It hasrun large deficits in billions of dollars every yearfrom excess costs over revenues.

That was under multiple-use managementwhich, in some sense, was the story. It was autilitarian story. The forests were used to servehuman needs. In the 1990s, the Forest Serviceadopted another story and another manage-ment mode, which has been called “ecosystemmanagement.” Basically, my message is thatecosystem management doesn’t work. It was amistake, and the fires of 2000 are, in consider-able part, a reflection of the failures of ecosystemmanagement. Maybe it can be fixed, but it’s in a grave condition, and these fires illustratethe problems.

Ecosystem management has exaggerated theeconomic problems of the Forest Service. Thedeficits are getting larger all the time. In 1999,the revenues were $788 million; the costs ofmanaging the system was $2.3 billion. So costswere almost three times revenues. Anotherexpense we have to factor in is fire expenses.This year, the Forest Service will probably spendclose to $1 billion on fire suppression in the west. That’s another major item on the debit side.

Of course, ecosystem management didn’tclaim to be doing great things economically.We’ve gone from 12 million board feet of timberharvested in 1989 to less than 3 million in 1999.But it did claim that it was going to be doinggood things environmentally. It’s not clear,however, that ecosystem management is doinggood things environmentally. In fact, the majorevents of the last seven or eight years in the westin terms of shaping the landscape, especiallygiven the de facto no-action managementoutcome resulting from gridlock, have been

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fires. So we had large fire seasons in 1994, 1996,and, the worst in fifty years, in the year 2000.

What have been the environmental conse-quences of fire? There are obviously some plusesand minuses. There are some places wherestand-replacement fires are a good thing, but onthe whole, they have probably been negative.Even in stand-replacement areas, we getabnormal patterns of burning and burning overwider areas at one time as a result of past firesuppression. In Ponderosa pine and other light-burning and frequent-fire cycle areas, we getcrown fires that have never occurred before.They burn the whole forest. Environmentally,we get air pollution; in some places, we sterilizethe soil. You can get tremendous runoffproblems if you don’t act quickly. Probably,under ecosystem management, we’ve had anegative environmental impact as well.

The Forest Service has had managementproblems for at least twenty or thirty years, butthe Forest Service has to come in for severecriticism for the quality of its management inthe 1990s. These fires that I’ve been talkingabout as being the major events of the decadewere not unanticipated or unknown. Leadingforesters have been telling us for ten years thatcatastrophic fire was about to arrive. In 1994,the National Commission on Wildfire Disastersaid western forests were fire prone and thatsomething desperately needed to be done.Nothing was done. In 1995, the Secretaries ofAgriculture and Interior put out a report thatalmost mirrored those conclusions. It came rightfrom the top of the agencies, and nothing was done.

In 1998 and 1999, G.A.O. put out reportssaying that catastrophic fires were threateningthe west, and nothing was done. Finally, thissummer, after we had the worst fire season infifty years and the national media focused on it,there seems to be some impetus to action. Butwhen you have these warnings and you have amanagement system that is not responding, youclearly have a big problem.

Now the Forest Service was founded on theidea of scientific management and technicalexpertise. That was also part of its story, itsrationale for existence. Of course, it neverrealized that in its fire management, going backto the 1910s, 20s, and 30s. It was probablyunscientific. A lot of the outside experts thoughtthe Forest Service was making large errors. Eveninside the Forest Service, there were people who

were saying as far back as then that things weregoing wrong.

But science has actually played a relativelymodest role and has been subservient topolitical and bureaucratic imperatives right backto the very beginning. Ashley Shiff wrote afamous book in 1962–-well, it should befamous—called Fire and Water, published byHarvard Press. It basically described a decades-long history of misuse of science in the ForestService. I would say that we’ve seen it again.Here in the 1990s, we had the best forestryscientists putting out reports, issuing warnings,saying something has to be done, and the ForestService basically ignoring this disaster waiting tohappen. As Ross says, there may be someexaggeration, but on the whole, we have tothink of it as a very negative experience: damageto the environment, loss of homes, loss oftourism, just the costs involved.

What about ecosystem management, whichhas become the new story to guide managementin the 1990? How does that stand upscientifically? When the Forest Service adoptedit, they said, “Well, we have to set objectives like‘healthy forests’ or ‘natural forests.’” Of course,no one had any idea what these phrases meant.People started making jokes that ecosystemmanagement is whatever the Forest Service oranybody else says it is. They were scientificallymeaningless, but they sounded good.

You can’t just go on forever with norelationship between your management systemand your actual goal. So in the last few years, theagency has tried to translate this into an actualmanagement reality, and it focused on the idea,in the last two or three years, that a healthyforest is going to be a pre-European settlementforest. That means we now have thousands ormillions of dollars being spent on historicalresearch, on sending out biologists andhistorians, to try to figure out what the forestlooked like in the west prior to Europeansettlement, about 1870 to 1890. There wasn’tany timber harvesting in those forests, whichmay be one of the reasons why timberharvesting is plummeting. We’re actuallyrealizing the goal of pre-European harvests.There wasn’t any livestock grazing. There wasn’tany motorized recreation. There were no skilifts, and so forth. It seems we are setting a goal that excludes most of us unless you are pre-European.

I call this management Disneyland manage-

ment. We’re going to create a giant theme parkacross the west to pre-European settlement. Ireally don’t think the American public, if theyever actually know what’s happening on theselands, will think we should turn it into one gianttheme park containing 10% of the land area ofthe United States and 40% of the Idaho land, thelargest percentage of any state of the nationalforest system.

In fact, this whole idea of going back to someoriginal condition has very little scientific basis.Dan Botkin wrote a book about 1990, DiscordantHarmony, in which he says that nature isbasically a series of moves from one disequi-librium state to another. There is no climax, nopermanent equilibrium. It’s more like chaosthan harmony. From a scientific point of view,it’s quite arbitrary to pick any point, like 1870 or1880, as the goal for restoring the land tosomething considered to be the idyllic conditionof the past that has been lost.

One way of characterizing it is the Disneylandphrase. Another way that gets to anotherelement is to call it “Garden of Eden” manage-ment. We lost touch with our original virtueswhen we were infected by industrial develop-ment and when humans, who were sinful, camefrom Europe, and disrupted the harmony ofnature. We have to restore that. Just like in theBible, we are waiting for the millennium, or wemay achieve that harmony in Heaven and thehereafter. The way we’re headed, we’ll turn themanagement of the forests over to thetheologians rather than to foresters.

This whole idea of ecosystem managementhas led practically to paralysis and gridlock. Thatparalysis and gridlock contributed significantly–obviously there were weather and otherproblems–to the forest problems and the fires ofthe years 2000. It is a story, but it’s afundamentally flawed story. When you look at itseriously, I don’t think it can hold up. It is anextremely appealing story at some level. It’s astory of secular salvation. I guess if enoughpeople are willing not to look at it, it might sell.But also, it provides no realistic basis formanagement. The idea that we’re really going to turn these forests back to 1870 or 1880 is unrealistic.

That basically leaves wide open the questionof what we’re trying to do. It’s partly that wideopenness, when your story doesn’t really tellyou anything and is actually misleading, thatencourages the tremendous politicization of the

Forest Service. So what do we do? In the long run, my

proposal is to abolish the Forest Service. I thinkthe agency has outlived its usefulness. Thewhole idea of centralized management from thefederal level is an idea that had its time inAmerican history but is no longer apt. TheForest Service, right now, is a bit like the RomanCatholic church on the verge of the ProtestantReformation, and we’re facing an era ofincreasing pluralism of values. The church is justhaving more and more trouble justifying that itis the authoritative priest with all the answersand that everyone else should follow theinstruction and wisdom as handed down fromon high. But I don’t really think we’re going toabolish the agency in the near term. It couldhappen, but it probably won’t. In any case weneed to move forward.

What would I recommend? Like a lot ofpeople, I feel that the need is for a basicdecentralization of authority in the agency. Fireprovides a great opportunity for that. I think thestates and localities will have to be not justconsultants but total participants in thedevelopment of any plans. Prescribed burning islike locating a toxic dump. You can’t locate it tillyou get the local people to agree to what youwant to do.

The Forest Service in general has lost so muchlegitimacy that it’s extremely difficult for theForest Service to take the lead and to sellsolutions for things like fire. I think whatactually is going to have to happen is that thestates and the localities will have to be the onesto put these solutions together. The ForestService will be part of the working team toimplement the solutions, it will provide a lot ofknowledge and expertise, like risk maps, so thatevery community will know where it stands vis-a-vis fire, and it will have to be an importantpart of the implementation process.

But I see Governor Kempthorne or GovernorRacicot as the ones who will have to becomeintimately involved in the details of planningthe response to fire in the west. They’re going tohave to be the ones to put the political heat on,and they will have to deal with the conflict ofpressures, with the environmental organiza-tions, which often resist a lot of these solutions,and with a lot of other people. There will, insome sense, be an incremental radical decentral-ization. The states won’t take over the landformally, but in terms of the actual decision-

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making process, I see the states playing a centralrole.

They are being driven to it. In a state likeIdaho, if you see a large chunk of your state burndown and you say that this is because the ForestService sat there and did nothing for the pasteight years, you might say, “We can do better.”In fact, we’d better do better unless we want tosee the same thing happen in two or three years.

Thank you.

LEON F. NEUENSCHWANDER: Good morn-ing, and thank you for having me. John askedme to talk about several things today. One waswhether we have enough background, research,and science information in fire ecology and firescience to proceed. The answer to that is yes. Am I finished?

I’m going to go through a series of statementshere, and some of you have heard them before.For research, we’re going to use “R”. We won’tsay “research” every time; we’ll just say “R”. Forother stuff, we’re going to say “duh,” and “duh”means duh. The first of these statements is,“We’ve had large fires in the past, and we’regoing to have large fires in the future.” Duh.

We’ve burned about 7 million acres so far thisyear. Those are perimeters, not the black acres.That is probably a fraction of what’s going toburn if we maintain the current managementapproach. We’ve heard that already from twodifferent people.

Montana and Idaho burned about 2.2 millionacres. Steve, that’s pretty close to what we had in1910. There were some similarities, too. We hada lot of fires in a lot of different locations, andsome of them got really big. Some of themburned really hot. Some of them didn’t. About30% of these reported acres were on private landin Idaho. However, nationally, about 70% of theacres that burned were on private land. This isnot too far different from the ratio of publicland to private land. We have assumed, though,that the effects from these large fires are thesame on private land as they are on federal land. R.

We spend over $2 billion a year, according toFEMA, fighting fire in the wildland/urbanintermix. This is a huge problem. R. Fires thisyear burned over 852 homes and otherstructures. We’re averaging 600 homes per year.We need to do something about that. R.

I’ll give you one example, my favorite. TheLos Alamos fire damage will likely exceed more

than a billion dollars. It burned 235 very expen-sive homes and 12 energy lab buildings. It alsoburned 47,000 acres. Help me with this one.This includes a building at the lab where the firstatomic bomb was dropped.

Let’s talk about smoke. We’ve already heardabout smoke. The smoke from the wildland fireswas extensive, and we’ve heard someprojections that it will get even worse in thefuture. The smoke concentrations exceededhealth and safety standards in many locations.R. How many people were really affected by thesmoke, and where were they? Our firefightersthat are making a living in this smoke concernme. That needs to be addressed. R.

The fallout from the smoke will likely befurther restrictions in prescribed fire smoke. Thisyear, from our burning on our school forest, Iwas shut down on seven of the twelve burningdays I had because of smoke restrictions. Catch22. This is a problem. We often use these pre-scribed fires to reduce the chances of havingthese large catastrophic fires. R. We have to dosomething reasonable about smoke.

Resource losses are not available yet. That’sprobably several years out. But I expect thelosses to be less than the suppression cost to putthe fire out. Losses on federal land will be evenless because about 68% of those acres burned inwilderness or roadless areas. My few economistfriends say that, in theory, it’s not supposed tohappen this way. In theory, the more we spend,the more we should save, not the more weshould pay. Also, with high costs are therehabilitation costs after fires. In one area inIdaho, we spent essentially $200,000 to rehab 39acres within a fire. R. A certain amount ofresearch suggests that a lot of this rehab is notneeded. Where it’s needed and how much iscertainly an R.

Now I’m going to step on John’s toes just alittle bit and talk about fire policy. It’s alwayschanged when you’ve had a fire crisis and a bigfire year, especially when the media makes itchange. It was perceived that fire suppressionefforts were costly, and they are. Many homeswere lost; many stories were told. Thesuppression costs were perceived in many placesas too little, too late. Fire suppression forces weretoo few, too tired, and overworked. Firesuppression forces were unavailable to fight firesduring the peak of the fire season.

I grew up in a little town near Sweet,Wyoming. I don’t know why it got that name.

The fire that was burning there got to 8,000acres, and in that 8,000 acres, they had eightfiremen. Well, it was Wyoming. But really. Thereare many examples where we just didn’t haveenough people.

Procedures and rules for prescribed fires werequestioned, especially around New Mexico.Some disastrous fires, it was said, could havebeen avoided altogether if we had taken adifferent course of action. Maybe. Maybe not.

Probably one of my favorite quotes in thisarea came from a report in the Missoulian whenthey were interviewing some of the people whowere harmed by the fires. It said, “Some fires justburned hotter than hell. You know, it did thatfire roll thing.” The “fire roll thing” just meansthat it sucked a lot of debris up and really gotout of control.

President Clinton did respond and came upwith a change in policy in September. There arefour parts to this. In the first part, he was goingto pay back the emergency firefighting funds,the funds they had already spent. Duh. Thesecond part of this was to increase firepreparedness. To this, they are going to add$340 million. I’ll come back to that. They had todo some of that. And, they’re going to increasethe local fire department and private landownerassistance with $88 million. This is innovative.This is new. For essentially the very first timeafter these fires – Steve, you can correct me if I’mwrong, but do it later in private – we’re going tobe very pro-active and spend about $390 millionin thinning and fuel treatments.

I have a few conclusions. Let’s start with thebasics. The goal of fire suppression is to savelives and private property and to protect naturaland cultural resources from fire at the lowestcost to the government. That’s out of themanual. It isn’t really to suppress all fires, butwhat if we did. Let’s just say we could. Whatwould happen? We would see a tremendousdecline in the biodiversity in our wild lands. Wewould see a decline in our fish populations. Iheard Fish and Game make a presentation thatsaid the elk herds in Idaho are declining in theLochsa, our premier elk herds. There are onlythree calves per hundred cows now, and thepopulation is falling. This is surely a response tolack of fire and to lack of the habitat that firecreates. We would have a forest that wouldbecome very uniform and very monotonous,and there wouldn’t be very much life in it. Duh.We don’t need an R here.

What if we just let all fires burn? Let’s justignore this goal of life and property. We’re justgoing to let all fires burn. Well, how many ofyou want one of those big grumbling infernos inyour back yard? I think it could put a wholebunch of our economies out of business in shortorder. That’s not acceptable either.

But it is true that eventually wildland fuelswill burn and eventually fires will occur. Froman ecological standpoint, in my opinion, theymust occur. It’s not a matter of “if”, it’s a matterof “when.” Further, these fires occur during dryyears. Global warming is happening, and wecould have more of those. The fire suppressionparadox is that as we put fires out, the fuel,forest succession, and tree density increase,making the forest more flammable and harder tosuppress when the next fire comes. We continueto suppress fires, and despite the fire record, weput out more than 95% of them.

We will continue to put these fires out untilthe forest conditions combine with drought,wind, and fuel to produce an inferno that wecan’t suppress. In my opinion, the fires that usedto burn at low intensity are the easy ones to putout. Today, all fires except prescribed fires in theforest burn the same. They burn hotter thanhell. Large, high-intensity fires are more difficultand more costly to suppress than low intensityfires. Duh. Small fires are easier to put out thanbig fires.

This year, as in any extensive fire year, thesolution, at least one of them, is fire prepared-ness, i.e. to increase the number of firefighters,the number of fire trucks, the number of fireplanes. This is Catch 22. Putting out more firesleads to more fuels which leads to more firetrucks which leads to more fuels which leads tomore fires which leads to more fire trucks, andso on. High levels of fire preparedness may evengive the public a false sense of security. Peoplewho live in the urban/wildland interface–Burtand Ethel, for example–may feel comfortableenough that they will not make the effort toclean up around their home. Catch 22. Fire inthe wildland/urban interface is a major problem.

In my opinion, the only way out of thisdilemma is the use of fuel treatments. NowSteve, help me with this: that means restorationthinning and restoring fire to fire-dependentcommunities in our forests and rangelands.Putting fire back is part of the solution.

Now let’s talk about the goal of the fueltreatments. It’s to reduce the chances of crown

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fires, to reduce the intensities of these wildfires,and to give our suppression forces a chance toextinguish the unwanted fires. It could be tobring the forest back to HRV [historic rangevariability] conditions. I’ll enjoy debating thatwith you later. It’s certainly a viable goal in someareas though maybe not everywhere. Wildlandfires and damages are going to cost us more inthe future, especially in the short term. Thenumber of fire trucks, the number of fueltreatments in the short term are not going tochange that. Catch 22. The sufficiently largeareas must be treated and in the right locationbefore we will realize a reduction in our fire costsand damages. Nevertheless, I think, because ofpast management actions, that restorationthinning and fuel treatments are needed torestore the role of fire and to reduce the fireintensities, especially around our urban inter-mix areas.

This problem is most acute in the dry, low-elevation forests and woodlands. Most of theseforests are on private land and are on the lowerportions of the national forests. Catch 22. Fueltreatments only on federal lands will not solvethe problem. A single national fuel treatmentstrategy is not compatible with our differentecosystems. There was a proposal that we set adiameter limit of 15 inches in our thinning, anational diameter limit. There was also a fearthat fuel treatments will be put in all forest typesand everywhere. It is too expensive, unneeded,illogical and ecologically unsound to undertakethese fuel treatments everywhere and to have asingle statement. This is stupid. It’s not evenduh. Catch 22. Fuel treatments can modify firebehavior, increase the survivability of natural,economic, and cultural assets and increase firesuppression effectiveness, but it will noteliminate the large fires. It will not eliminate theneed to clean up around houses and structures,along right-of-ways and highways, and onprivate and state lands.

Fuel treatments should be concentratedwhere they will do the most good. I’ve alreadybrought up the low elevation, dry forests. There,leaving the large trees and removing some of the small trees, the brush, and the slash are thepreferred treatments. Some of this has to donein the private and urban intermix as well. Wherethey will also do most good is along the roadsand right-of-ways and around the houses.

Logging is one tool. Prescribed fires is onetool. Thinning is another. In some circum-

stances, they can be used independently. Insome circumstances, it’s questionable whetherchanging the structure of that forest is going tomake it more sustainable. You must change thestructure and the function together. Often thebest results occur when logging, restoration,thinning, and prescribed fire are used together.Catch 22. Stop logging on federal lands. Catch22. Stop prescribed fires because of smoke.

President Clinton authorized 3 million acresof thinning out of the 39 million federal acresthat have been classified as high risk. This is lessthan 10%. Catch 22. It’s probably not enough.What is enough? R. Where should they be done?That’s also R. How big? That is also R. I don’tknow what we’ll do with all of the small trees,debris, and little green crap that we take out ofthe forests with this thinning. Catch 22. Burn it.

I don’t know how these fuel treatments andthinning will affect fish and wildlife popula-tions. R. But I do know the consequences ofdoing nothing, of not doing the thinning. It’salready been stated. It will be more of the same:increased deforestation, increased erosion,increased sediment in our streams, decreasedhuntable wildlife, and an ever-increasing set ofsupression costs and damages.

Thank you very much.

FREEMUTH: OK. We’re going to have aboutten minutes for questions, then we’ll take abreak to set up for the next panel. We have thequestionnaire forms on your programs, but wehave a roving mike to use for oral questions.We’ll get the three scientists and Steve back upon the stage for some questions.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Can we afford toleave untouched all these lands that thisAdministration has set aside as roadless wherewe can’t do anything because of lack of access.Can the forests afford to remain untouched?

NELSON: If you look at it one way, you cansay that since the Forest Service loses money onmost of the things they do, the less they do, themore we save. It also seems at times that themore they spend, the less they do. A lot of thecomplaint is about the fact that nothing ishappening even though we are still spending $3billion a year on management for the U. S.Forest Service. It mostly seems to be going forpaper work. I don’t have the answer, but thisroadless stuff does somewhat come out of the

idea of ecosystem management. If you’re goingto go back to pre-European, they didn’t have anyroads either or any timber harvesting. It’s part ofthe whole idea that our real goal should be thatthe forest should be natural. That’s our storythat we’re actually operating under, at least inthe Clinton Administration.

Some people don’t buy the story, but it’s beengoverning land management. It’s that thepurpose of the forest is not utilitarian–that wasmultiple use–but to make the forest natural. Idon’t think it’s either possible or sensible, but Inever liked the multiple use thing much, at leastas it was implemented. The new story has toinvolve the idea that natural is not a good ideaeither in theory or in practice. In a certain sense,the forests are going to be more like a garden.We have an obligation to decide what we wantfor these forests, whether it’s for them to beaesthetically appealing or a source of timber orwhatever we want, and we’re going to have tomanage affirmatively to get there. I think road-less stuff is a diversion from that.

FREEMUTH: I have a question over here.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Question for Dr.Pyne. In your book on Australian forestry, youtalk about how the early British-trained forestersin Australia changed the narrative, particularlyMcArthur, much more quickly than thenarrative has changed here in the United Statesabout the role of fire in forests. Is there anythingwe can learn from that Australian experiencethat can be applied today?

PYNE: I don’t think there is anythingspecifically that we can learn, but what’sinteresting about the Australian story is thatthey tried very specifically to integrate their firepractices with Australian history. This wassomething they needed to do because it was partof their identity. Their native vegetation,eucalyptus, was adapted to fire. The people whohad resided there for tens of thousands of years,the aborigines, had used fire. Australians arerediscovering their own cultural identity byadopting this strategy, and they are repudiatingthe American model with all its aircraft. Theywere very specific about this because that wouldmean they had been re-colonized. They leftBritain and now would become an Americancolony. They very specifically rejected that, so itwas an act of nationalism. That was part of the

appeal. It was able to move beyond technicalissues. So I would say that’s the lesson I woulddraw from it.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: It’s a two-partquestion, but I’ll take about two minutes. Minehas to do with the Special Projects Unit that theForest Service has and relates to the making oftheir topo maps. They have overlays of canyonsthat could generate fire storms. These are stormsthat twist like tornados and can pull up trees upfrom half a mile away and have crowns of 500feet high. Sometimes the embers must travelseveral miles high in the atmosphere to coolbelow kindling temperature. My question is thatwith these topo maps and the kind of supportthat the aircraft line gets, if they couldcoordinate with their scratch maps before theygo out to support the firefighters, wouldn’t thathelp? Now when they do dump their chemicals,those chemicals contain a fire chemical, sodiumcyanide, which turns to cyanide when it hitswater. A study done fifty years ago indicatedeffects on small sports fish, and after the fires of2000, the feds told them to change it. With thefed funding and with the outfitters and rafterswe have, if we have seagoing fish that areaffected, won’t it be three or four years before wesee the results?

NEUENSCHWANDER: R.

PATRICK SHEA: A geologist in the insuranceindustry created the Richter scale forearthquake, and it’s a useful scientific index thatallows you to assess what the actual damage wasfrom an earthquake. Why in the fire communitycan’t we come up with perhaps what we’d callthe Andrus scale, which would be thetemperature of the fire, the high and low interms of its effect on the ecology; a smoke indexin terms of health; and then a watershed impactindex, which would include the actual costs ofsuppression and then the cost of whatever post-fire activity went on.

PYNE: Yes, we can, and in many places wehave. I’ve worked with the Boise Forest, andthey’ve developed what they call the Fire HazardIndex. Nationally, the Forest Service has beenputting these together. I’ve worked withGovernor Lamb and Neil Sampson and others,and we did this for the state of Colorado. Thiscan be done, and it’s useful because it can be

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done before the fires start, and it can give you anarea to prioritize where you want to spend yourlimited dollars on treatment.

FREEMUTH: We can take one more. Here’s ahand, and then I’ll turn the mike back toGovernor Andrus.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: A question for Dr.Nelson. Given the pretty even split on so manypolitical issues in the American population, canwe expect anything better than the gridlockwe’ve seen in Forest Service management if weget rid of the Forest Service or change themanagement model so that the states have morecontrol?

NELSON: If you look at the map, there was allred and all blue. It seems the gridlock comesfrom trying to combine the two, though there

was a little story in the paper that said thesolution was to split up and give Bush all the redand give Gore all the blue for the next fouryears. It seems to me that if you get smallerunits, you’re more likely to have morehomogenous groups and less division.

ANDRUS: We’re at the break, but permit meto make an observation. I saw Dave Alexanderarrive this morning; he’s supervisor of thePayette National Forest. I would bet that DaveAlexander could have gone out last spring northof Payette, looked at the fuel piles, and told youwhat was going to happen if you had a lightningstorm. But I’ll tell you, Bob, that he didn’t havethe money and didn’t have the authority to goout there. So closer control at the local levelwould help.

We’re going to have a short break, and thenI’ll have you all back in here for the next panel.



Boise, Idaho

STAKEHOLDERS ' PANEL

Marc Johnson, ModeratorAndrus Center Board MemberPartner, The Gallatin Group

James B. HullState Forester, Texas Forest Service

Darrell R. KnuffkeVice President, The Wilderness Society

Brad LittleOwner, Little Land and Livestock Co.

Jaime PinkhamExecutive Committee, Nez Perce Tribe

James S. RileyExecutive Director, Intermountain Forest Association

James C. SmalleySenior Fire Service Specialist

National Fire Protection Association

Dr. Gary J. WolfePresident and CEO

Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation

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CECIL D. ANDRUS: Let me remind theattorneys here that your C.L.E. registration slipis on your program. It’s on the flyleaf on yourprogram. Fill it out, put it in a box on theregistration table, and you’ll get six hours ofC.L.E. credit if you’re an attorney licensed inIdaho, Washington, or Oregon.

Let me introduce Marc Johnson, who willcoordinate the panel for the stakeholders. MarcJohnson is a partner and Boise principal of theGallatin Group, which is an industrial affairsand business management firm, located inBoise, Spokane, Seattle, and Portland. Marc washead of public television here many years ago at

Boise State University. He worked with me in theGovernor’s Office for eight years as my Chief ofStaff and now has found honest employmentand is making money outside the political arenaby heading up the Gallatin Group.

I give you Marc Johnson.

MARC C. JOHNSON: Thank you, Governor. What we want to do with this panel is to ask

our panelists, some of whom have come greatdistances to participate, to respond initially to acouple of questions. Then I’ll give you anopportunity to get into the conversation fairlyquickly. I want to ask each of them for, frankly,

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a sound-bite answer to this question: Whatimpact, from your perspective, has come aboutas a result of the fires in the west this year?

Let’s start with Jim Hull, who is the TexasState Forester. He came a long way to be with usand arrived about midnight last night. He is veryactive with the National Association of StateForesters and heads up their Fire Committee.Jim, from the perspective of the state foresters,how devastating a year was this fire season thatwe just came through.

JAMES B. HULL: It was obviously extremelydevastating in many ways. One was that itchanged the entire way we look at fire pro-tection in America. Until we come to grips withthat, all of the rhetoric that might come out ofthis meeting and many others that are beingheld across the nation are really moot issues.

As we look for a new phrase or new title, we’re going to have to look at a sign like that,draw a big red line right through the middle ofit, about where the heart of that buffalo is, andsay, “The Fires: No Next Time.” Until we changeour paradigm about how we look at wild fire in America, quite honestly, we’re never going to get there.

JOHNSON: Brad Little, leader in the livestockindustry, articulate spokesman for those whouse the public land as range land. What’s youranswer to that question? How devastating has itbeen from your perspective and your industry’sperspective?

BRAD LITTLE: Marc, here in Idaho, we hadsome of the big range fires. We lost a lot ofcattle, and if you have livestock that are burntup, that’s obviously a significant factor.

One of the things that’s probably of mostconcern to us is the position of federal agencieson rehab, particularly for the medium andsmaller operators that have only one unit tooperate on. They have a year-round unit, andthey have livestock out there all year round.They’re talking now about three to five years ofrest if they’re doing some of these chemicaltreatments for annual grasses. That’s going toput those people out of business, and that needsto be addressed. There needs to be some kind ofdialogue on it.

It would be nice if we could have the dialoguebefore the fire instead of after the fire becauseyou’ve got to look at buying hay and some other

things. It’s really going to be critical for some ofthese operators in the west. If you’re in thelivestock business or any other business outthere on the land and if you have a fire that’sburning, you have a lot of high-stress thingsgoing on. You’re worried about your family, andyou’re worried about your livestock. Besidesthat, it’s a very emotional time. When you’reout there moving that livestock out of the wayand are worried about the safety of your familyand employees, it’s really a problem to havearbitrary rules come in on top of it.

JOHNSON: Jim Smalley is with the NationalFire Protection Association and came all the wayfrom Massachusetts to be with us. Mr. Smalley,you’re in charge of educating the Americanpeople about the impacts of fire in the wildland/urban interface. Tell us, from your perspective,what happened this year.

JAMES C. SMALLEY: Well, we didn’t have anunusually high or anomalous peak in thenumber of home losses, given the relativenumber of acres that were on fire. We had 850 to1,000 homes lost. That may sound heartless onone hand, but it could have been much worse.Our concerns are that we don’t take a knee-jerkreaction and that we don’t just put in more firetrucks and more suppression and go that route.We have to have a significant change in coursein redefining responsibilities and redefiningwhat this interface is. This is a solvable problem.We don’t have to have this problem. Thewildland/urban interface or intermix–where theeaves meet the leaves–is not a fire problem at all.It is a land-use planning problem. It’s only a fireproblem when there is a fire. That mix is createdmuch earlier than the natural event. Is it adisaster? The fire is only a disaster when there ishuman involvement.

JOHNSON: Darrell Knuffke, you’re the VicePresident of the Wilderness Society, one of thenation’s leading and oldest conservation andenvironmental organizations. How is thisdialogue unfolding after the fire season fromyour perspective?

DARRELL R. KNUFFKE: Thanks for notidentifying me as one of the nation’s oldestconservationists. I’m rapidly approaching that.The topic of this conference is “the fires nexttime.” I don’t think we have a hope in hell of

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preparing for the fires next time unless we comeout of this conference and others like it with apretty clear-headed understanding of the firesthis time. What happened? We think whathappened is that what could burn, did burn. Itwas a function principally of the weather andthe convergence of a number of other factors.Everything burned: cut-over private land, somewild lands.

The thing we’ve seen more than anything elsein the wake of this fire season is the re-ignitionof the public policy debate over how we manageour forests. Everybody who has disliked theClinton Administration’s forest management orroadless policies or pretty much anything else,including the Florida recount, sees some hope inthe dramatic nature of these fires to changethings. It’s sort of a mass “gotcha” by people onboth sides of the issue. If we don’t stop that,we’re not going to get very far down the trail.

JOHNSON: Jaime Pinkham has been on theExecutive Committee of the Nez Perce Tribe.He’s a very articulate spokesman for NativeAmerican governments. He has recently becomethe head of the fisheries effort for the Nez PerceTribe. Jaime, we’re delighted to have you here. Iknow you have an academic background inforestry issues as well. Tell us from yourperspective and the tribal perspective what’sgoing on and what has gone on this year.

JAIME A. PINKHAM: Well, in Indian countryin the U. S... Actually, all the U. S. used to beIndian country. Maybe that’s another goal ingetting it back to pre-European conditions...

JOHNSON: ...That’s a different conference,Jaime.

PINKHAM: Actually, in Indian country, wegot by fairly easily this past year when you lookat the national statistics. About 3200 acres werelost. Something we need to keep in mind, whenyou look at the dedicated effort by the people onthe fire lines, is that 25% of those firefighterscame from Indian communities. That does offera form of employment in very depressed com-munities. Tribal communities are very rural, andsometimes we lack the infrastructure. We talkabout the urban/wildland interface, but whenyou look at Indian country, there is no interfacebecause we live intimately with the land.

We’re beginning to see more and more issues

about where we put our dispersed housingbecause we’ve always had a lack of planningdollars. One of the disparities is that for everydollar that the federal agencies, like the ForestService, receive for coordinated management,Indian country only gets 35 cents. We’ve reallybeen lagging behind on adequate planning onhow to do better fire management as well asintegrated planning, which means where shouldour home sites go? We’re running into thatconflict more and more, and we’re trying toelevate the importance in our tribal commu-nities on how we respond to those issues.

One of the things we really took a hard lookat this past year was all the talk about how wewant to mimic nature. We took control ofnature, but now we want to mimic nature. In asense, it’s giving the knowledge back to natureand relying on that knowledge to help usmanage the forest and the ecosystem.

One of the biggest investments the Nez PerceTribe has made over the past few years, aninvestment in science and political talent as wellas capitol investments, is to rebuild those criticalhabitats for endangered salmon and steelhead.We’ve made considerable investments there,and as we watched these fires unfold, rollingthrough these habitats, it raised a concern for us.With that kind of investment and with thosegoals in mind of recovering endangered species,we’re concerned about the effect of the fire onour ability to recover these endangered species.That’s another equation. We can talk about theurban interface; we can talk about our depressedcommunities, timber salvage, and so forth; but Ithink we also need to talk about the endangeredspecies and help find a solution to this equation.

JOHNSON: Gary Wolfe is the president andCEO of the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation,headquartered in Missoula, Montana, nationallyrespected leader on conservation issues, partic-ularly as they pertain to wildlife management.Gary, give us your perspective on what we havebeen through and how it is impacting the west.

GARY J. WOLFE: I’m in a pretty enviableposition here. I don’t have to worry about allthese other impacts that we’re talking about. Ican focus on the impacts on elk, on elk country,and on elk-hunting opportunities. I recognizethat there were some very disastrous, verydevastating impacts, especially from a humanand economic standpoint, but looking at it from

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a wildlife perspective, especially on big game–elk and deer–the species that have evolvedthroughout their entire existence with wildfiresin the western landscape, both short-term andlong-term impacts have occurred. Short-term,certainly there were deaths of individualanimals from large catastrophic fires. It caused achange in the movements and distribution ofanimals. It certainly disrupted recreationalopportunities like hunting. Some of my outfitterfriends were actually burned out of their areas;and they can’t really get in and set up theircamps this year.

In regard to the long term, what we’velearned over time is that these animals haveevolved with wild fires. In the northern Rockies,many of the most important winter range areaswere created as a result of catastrophic wild fires.1910 is a good example in the Selway and theLochsa. That is not to say that’s the best way todo it. In fact, we think there are many betterways to do it than with catastrophic wild fires.But the reality is that the long-term impact onbig game animals in the west is going to bepositive as a result of this. Short-term problems.Long-term positive benefits. There are betterways to do it in the future, and we’ll be talkingabout that in a minute.

JOHNSON: Absolutely. Jim Riley is the execu-tive with Intermountain Forest Association,headquartered in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. Herepresents the wood products industry in Idaho and Montana and across the northwest. Jim, what’s your perspective from the woodproducts industry.

JAMES S. RILEY: Well, Marc, last summer’sfires have been a huge lesson for all westerners,certainly, and I hope across the nation. Theperson who said it best was Patrick Moore, whowas the co-founder of Greenpeace. I made hisacquaintance over a year ago. He speaks aboutthe forest and what needs to happen in theforest. His simple message is that we need tohelp the public see the forest through a new setof eyes. What he means and what is the turningpoint of this last summer is that simple sound-bite solutions to forest management, which thisdebate has swirled around for the past twodecades, are not consistent with the dynamics ofan evolving, changing forest ecosystem. Peoplewho thought that they were protecting theirforests by excluding all kinds of activities,

including fire, and who practiced managementactivities that mimicked nature, actually havedone more not to protect the forests thanthey’ve done to actually protect them. Withthose lessons behind us, my real hope from allthis is that we can move forward in an era ofmore thoughtful, cooperative, and collaborativedecision-making on public forest land manage-ment and leave behind this era of polarization.

JOHNSON: Let’s pick up on that point. Thescience panel earlier gave the view that we havea window of opportunity here to do something.Clearly the public is better informed than it wasback in May regarding the impacts of forest fires.We have a window of opportunity. We have anew political environment apparently takingshape. How do we capitalize on that?

RILEY: I think it’s going to take two things.Part of the recognition of what the science panelhas very capably reported again this morning is that the evidence of existing problems outthere is compelling and overwhelming. If youremember what Leon talked about, he said ofthe millions of acres of unacceptable foresthealth conditions that lend themselves to thesecatastrophes, less than 10% are under currenttreatment plans.

So with that scientific background, I hope wecan capitalize on the leadership of the governorsof the western states. They’ve already stood upin the Western Governors’ Association and otherplaces and said they want to help evolve plansthat work locally and that are based on some ofthe principles that came from the previousAndrus Center conference and the white paperthat Governor Andrus held up today, part ofwhich suggests localized decision-making, andmarry that up with the $1.8 billion in financing,which was authorized by the ClintonAdministration but will be spent by whoever isin office next year. If that can be given to thegovernors to work out local plans and if we canhave local collaboration and real spots on theground, I think we can bring about that era ofnew management.

JOHNSON: Don’t be bashful. Everyone has a microphone; everyone has them turned on. Darrell?

KNUFFKE: We’ve heard some of the speakersthis morning talk about how significantly

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inadequate that infusion of money is. That tellsus at the Wilderness Society that we’ve got to bepretty darn strategic about how we spend it.That gets me back to the role of science. I was alot more sanguine about the role of science lastnight than I was after this morning’s panel. Thescientists seem to have a lot of room fordisagreement. But still, there ought to be someplaces where we can come together.

Bruce Vento, who just passed away, was fondof saying that we’re all entitled to our ownopinion, but we’re not entitled to our own facts.There needs to be some body of agreed-uponinformation from which we can, as a committeeof people, move forward and take some steps.

JOHNSON: Where do you think thedivergence is? Where is the lack of consensus?To put it more positively, where is theconsensus? Where can we work together?

KNUFFKE: It seems to me, from what I’veheard this morning, that at least one area wherewe have a real problem, perhaps the mostfixable of our problems, is at the interface or theintermix. Forests, wilderness areas, roadless areasdon’t deal in catastrophes, don’t deal indevastation. They deal in natural events, someof which are more dramatic than others. What isgoing to drive this debate in the years ahead isfear on the part of people who live where theeaves meet the leaves. That phrase is a lot more appealing to me than the urban/ruralinterface. Nonetheless, we’d know what we’retalking about.

JOHNSON: So what do we do? Let’s bespecific.

KNUFFKE: I think specifically what we haveto do is bring together all these people from thefederal agencies all the way down to localhomeowners and homeowner associations andput together something like an ExtensionService or maybe an extension of the ExtensionService and help people know what they canand should do.

Get the insurance companies involved.Anyone who thinks the insurance industry,through rate structures, can’t influence positivebehavior and penalize negative behavior hasn’tbought insurance for a sixteen-year-old lately.They can do it, but they haven’t. The wholesubject is more than just professional and

academic with me. I live in a frame house in thetrees in northern Minnesota. I called myinsurance agent and said, “What are you hearingin the wake of these fires?” He said, “Nothing,”and this was State Farm. “It’s not a a problem uphere.” I think it’s a problem everywhere, andwe’re going to have to engage at that level andoffer some incentive to people to retrofit theirhomes and to be a lot more thoughtful inzoning and building codes in these places.

JOHNSON: Jim?

SMALLEY: Well, let me say this. I was at aconference last week in California, and everytime I go to that state, I hear the same kind of anargument. The insurance industry and the firedepartments should fix it, and that’s theresponse to fire. One thing is that there is amisconception that there is an “insuranceindustry.” There is no insurance industry. Thereare insurance companies.

I sit on a land-use planning committee for theInstituite for Business and Home Safety, andtheir member companies are large insurancecompanies. At every meeting, we have to gothrough this little thing about rate-setting. Wecan’t discuss rates, and we can’t discuss any kindof monetary premiums. They cannot talk aboutthat among themselves. Some of the tools thatwe need to assess risk are just now becomingavailable to the insurance industry. There is atalk in structural fire departments about resi-dential sprinklers, about putting these things in homes to save lives and property and thengetting a rate break from the insurance com-panies. The problem is they have no trackhistory. They have no way to know whetherthese things actually work. In addition, what isa fair rate structure?

Say someone is living out in a wildland areaand they have a combustible roof with pinestraw all over the top of it and in the gutters.They are finally convinced to put on a reallygood non-combustible roof. I’m going to put onslate or tile, make it look really nice. The firepeople are saying, “The insurance companyshould give you a break in your premium.” Thefact is that, since you have added value to yourhouse, your insurance premium goes up.

The other irony is that–let’s say we have agood program to replace combustible roofs withnon-combustible roofs. Non combustible roofs,let’s say, have a replacement cost of $10,000.

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Hypothetically, let’s say the insurance companysays, “We’ll give you a 50% rate reduction inyour fire insurance.” Go back and look at yourhomeowners’ insurance. How much of thatinsurance is for fire? Mine is $500 a year. $400 ofthat is in liability, replacement costs, and thatsort of thing. The smallest percentage is in fireinsurance. So if they give you a 50% cut, thatmight amount to $25 per year. How many yearswill it take you to pay back a $10,000investment? The incentives are placed at thewrong end.

The other irony I like to point out is that theinsurance industry is the largest purchaser ofreplacement roofs in the United States, but it’sbasically from hail. Hail and wind damage. AndJim Hull from Texas knows that.

JOHNSON: Brad, you’re itching to get in this,I can see.

LITTLE: When was the last time an insurancecompany said, “Our stock price is going to godown, and we’re going to lower our dividendsbecause of a fire claim. Every time there is a fireclaim, FEMA jumps in and does something, sowhy should the insurance companies doanything. Until the politicians quit standing upand saying, “We’re going to make everybodywhole,” the insurance companies aren’t going todo anything.

SMALLEY: You’re right. The incentives areplaced at the wrong end. We’ve made wealthysome homeowners living in large homesdestroyed by devastating fires. FEMA comes inwith low-cost loans, and they don’t build thehome they had; they build one twice as big.They still put the vegetation right back where it was.

RILEY: I agree that we ought to start lookingat places where there is agreement, and thewildland/urban interface is one of those.However, if I had the numbers rights,somewhere between 30 and 50 million acres isjudged to be at risk. Is that right? OK, 39 millionis the figure Leon uses. Of that, I would say, lessthan 1% is truly in the urban/wildland interface.The rest of it, the vast majority is wildlands thatare not covered by any insurance program. Wecan get all distracted by these kinds of issues,and I think Jaime Pinkham’s point is excellent.While we spend a lot of time worrying about

protecting the $200,000 house out there, wemight have burned up invaluable riparianhabitat for endangered species. Why does thatmake sense? Is that the right way to do ourpriorities? That’s what we have to be looking at.

HULL: One quick comment on the insurance.I don’t sell insurance, but they’re not quite as inthe dark as we might think. In places in eastTexas, we worked with the local fire districts,volunteer fire departments, and put in dryhydrants on a three-mile grid. The insuranceindustry dropped the rates by 10 to 15% for thehomeowners that lived there. That many timesmore than paid for the cost of installation of dryfire hydrants. So there’s a lot we can do thatperhaps we’ve not explored yet.

SMALLEY: That’s very important, and I’m nottrying to lessen that impact. But that’s thesuppression response end of it. I agree with thatidea, I think it’s a wonderful idea, and I totallysupport it, but we’ve got to redefine what itmeans for protection. I’m a second generationfirefighter. My father used to say, “Oh, don’tworry if the Washington politicians take theshirt off your back. They’re going to have abureau to put it in.”

While fire suppression is the normal responsein municipal settings, it doesn’t work on a vastscale of wildlands. We have a fire department,but we don’t have a flood department. We don’thave a wind department to come out andcontrol wind emergencies. We have to get awayfrom the idea that we can respond to thesethings in some sort of meaningful scale. Whenyou have two hundred houses on fire and sevenfire trucks, do the math. Duh. It doesn’t work.We have to think of a different way to putprotection into structures and into theseinterface areas. We really have to separate whatwe can really solve, which is an interfaceproblem, and the other factors andinterdependencies. It becomes like trying tokeep a hundred corks under water at the sametime. You can get some under, but they’re goingto pop back up. This is the nature of what we’retrying to do here today.

KNUFFKE: I would suggest that rather thanthe fact that we don’t have a flood department,we have a couple of them: the Bureau ofReclamation and the Corps of Engineers. At leasta fair amount of the way those folks have made

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a living is by protecting people against their ownfoolishness of building in flood plains. We dothe same thing in erosive beaches and havemassive public works projects for beachreplenishment when homes don’t belong therein the first place. So all of that has served overtime to insulate people from their personalresponsibility to make sensible decisions.

SMALLEY: You’re right, and I live in a coastalcommunity. When the storm hits the coast ofMassachusetts, the cameras are usually in mycommunity, so you’re seeing my neighborsbeing washed off into Massachusetts Bay. Itcomes down really to personal responsibilityand ownership of that property. Any attempt wemake to force federal or state agencies to dosomething fails when we get to the privateownership, the homeowner. There are all kindsof incentives and ways to force compliance, toforce safety, and to use mitigation measures. Iwork for the National Fire ProtectionAssociation, and we publish a set of national firecodes that cover a lot of things that are righthere in this room and that are protecting usfrom fire, things that, when you walk into theroom, you are not aware of. Certainly exit signs,sprinkler systems, floor finishes, wall finishes,and that sort of thing are covered under the firecodes. I don’t personally believe that it’s a codeissue because only 16 states of the fifty havebuilding codes that cover all buildings and alloccupancies. I know I’m out here in the westwhere you really don’t want to talk much aboutcodes and ordinances, but I don’t think it’s acode problem.

JOHNSON: Yes, we don’t want to get intothat. Let’s move on. Jim Riley, is prescribedburning something we can start some consen-sus about?

RILEY: I think there can be some consensusabout prescribed burning, but again, I thinkpeople have tried to say that prescribed burningis the answer, that if we control the time the fireis lit in some of these ecosystems, they’ll burn inthe ways that would do certain things. That, Ibelieve is folly, according to a lot of the research–R– that’s out there.

I was meeting with Jack Ward Thomas theother day, and he made the pertinent observa-tion: “We’re talking about reintroducing fireinto ecosystems that have never existed before

in these forests. They have evolved to the pointthat we don’t know what they will do.” That’swhat the data is telling you. If you did that with-out mechanical treatment, logging, and thinningbeforehand, you’ll have a disaster on your handsof the magnitude of what we just went through.

JOHNSON: Gary?

WOLFE: I’d just like to build upon that, Jim.I think one of the most important things weneed to do is to recognize that active man-agement is something we have to embrace. Fortoo long, we’ve had this difference of opinionbetween industrial foresters and conserva-tionists. Some people in the conservation andenvironmental movement say prescribed firecan do everything. Other folks in industry say“No, we don’t need fire at all. Commercialtimber harvest can do everything.” I think Rossreally hit on it this morning when he talkedabout a variety of tools, and we can’t use all ofthe tools interchangeably. They’re compatiblewith each other. You have to have a manage-ment plan and goals in mind. You have to bringa variety of stakeholders together, collaborate atthe local level, and move forward with commongoals and common vision.

JOHNSON: Do you see that happening nowand the beginning of that with this newnational fire strategy that we will hear moreabout later today?

WOLFE: I don’t know whether it’s going tohappen at the national level, but there is aspecific program that we have going here inIdaho that I think is a good model at the locallevel. It’s called the Clearwater Basin Elk HabitatInitiative. It’s in one area, one basin, about sixmillion acres in the Clearwater Basin, but it in-cludes a whole range of stakeholders, includingthe Intermountain Forest Association, the RockyMountain Elk Foundation, the Idaho Fish andGame Department, the Forest Service, the BLM,some of the private timber corporations, and theUniversity. That’s a collective group that isworking together at the local level to identifycommon philosophies, common values, andcommon goals for the Clearwater Basin andthen developing prescriptions that can beimplemented and that everyone can embrace. Ithink that’s a perfect example of how we have tomove forward.

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JOHNSON: Jim Hull, how does prescribedburning fit into this equation?

HULL: I came here prepared to talk about afew things. When I walked through the door awhile ago, I was handed this paper. It said,“Boise Officers Shoot Man in Confrontation.” Ihope I don’t get shot over this.

JOHNSON: The governor insisted that theguns be checked at the door. I think you‘re OK.

HULL: Flying up here, I thought, “I’m notgoing to get into politics and elections,” but Ireally did like that “Rs” and “Duhs” thing of Dr.Neuenschwander. What was the question?Prescribed burning. I think I am probably like90% of the folks in here. I’m an absolutepyromaniac when it comes to prescribed burns.I love to do it. I think there is great potentialthere. The problem I have with it is priorities. Isee the absolutely huge amounts of dollars thatare being allocated to prescribed burns on a veryfew number of acres. As a state forester that hasresponsibility for all rural fire protection in mystate, as do most other state foresters, with thewest being a little bit of an exception, I do worryabout the dollars and how to prioritize. For thesame dollars that are going into a those very fewacres of land, I think we could do a tremendousamount in recognizing what the situation isaround the nation. While you’re from the west,the fire problem we had this year was not awestern problem. It was a national problem.

I came up here and drove from here toMissoula. I found it very interesting that as Istopped in these various fire camps, most of thepeople that I saw were from North Carolina andGeorgia and other states all over the rest of thenation, outside of the west. Also, as I wentthrough these little communities, I found it veryinteresting that I saw the same identical thingthat I see in Texas and throughout the otherparts of the nation. I saw the signs in thewindows of stores. “Thanks to the firefighters.We appreciate what you‘re doing.” But I alsosaw, as I visited with some of those folks thathad had their houses destroyed and had lostproperty, the same thing that I saw in the eyes ofTexans that had lost property. They appreciatewhat all of us are doing to suppress these fires,but folks, the reality is that Americans wouldrather not have destructive wildfires in the firstplace. I think that is where we have to come

from. We’ve got to look at spending priorities. There is so much we could learn about

wildfire. Four of the most devastating fireseasons we’ve had in the state of Texas occurredin the last five years. It didn’t just happen.Certainly fuels, population build-up, land-usechanges and all those things were part of it. Butwhen we got to looking at it and analyzing it, welearned what we should have known all along.When you look back at 150 years of weatherpatterns in Texas, you find they are on a 25 to 30year cycle. All of my career, up to 1996, hadbeen spent in a wet cycle, and every decision Imade was based on this wet cycle. In 1996, wecame out of it, and it’s just as predictable asanything could possibly be.

Therefore, we’re going to have to change theway we look at wildfire, reforestation, andeverything else in the state. We must learn whatit is we’re all about. A lot of these prescribedburn dollars could be going to learn that. One ofthe things I’ve done in Texas is to realize thatwildfire suppression is extremely expensive. I’vededicated 10% of my entire fire budget toprevention. Folks, that 10% is paying a wholelot more dividends than that 90% we spend onsuppression. It’s a matter of priorities whetherwe prescribe burn, whether we do an awful lot ofother things, but we have to look at all of it.

JOHNSON: Other thoughts on prescribedburning? Darrell?

KNUFFKE: The Wilderness Society sees it as avaluable tool, one of a mix of tools. Apart fromthe horrible human cost of the Los Alamos fires,the other victim, we feared for a while, might bethe use of fire as a tool. I was delighted to seethat the press across the country did not rise tothe bait and basically said, “Los Alamos is anexample of what not to do.” It does not stand for the proposition that we should not use controlled fires in our forests. That was good news.

SMALLEY: Around the interface areas, onething we’d like to emphasize is that prescribedfires should be used in strategic goals rather thanin quantity goals. We don’t think it should beused because we have to burn a thousand acreshere or a thousand acres over there. Rather, ifyou burn a smaller number of acres strategically,it makes it more manageable.

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PINKHAM: Educated as a forester, I havecome to understand that science isn’t alwaysfailsafe, and neither is forest policy. While we dowant to reintroduce fire back into the ecosys-tem, we need to also understand that where it’sbeen excluded for so long, we can’t just launchback in there and reintroduce it then and there.At the same time, we can’t stand back and donothing. It’s a painstakingly long process withcontinued drastic consequences. There needs tobe the opportunity to allow some managementactivities. I think the term people are using nowis “restoration forestry,” to try to reintroduce thediverse cycles into the ecosystem. But we needto come to a common understanding of boththe science and ecological processes that are out there. Too often we get bound up onquestioning each other’s motives on why wewant to do this, but if the focus is truly to restoreback to nature’s methods of management, wehave to allow that there has to be somemanipulation, including thinning to reduce thedensities, and then going through a transitionperiod. We have to reintroduce fire at that time.

LITTLE: I thought we had done this before.We’ve talked about forest health for the lastfifteen years here in the Boise Forest. We talkedabout forest health, and they said, “We’re goingto clean up these forests, log all these trees.”Then here come the lawyers, and everythinggets tied up, and all these plans are stopped. It’sjust like these consensus groups. All you have todo is have one guy file one suit on oneendangered species, and the whole thing is fornaught. So that looks to me like the biggesthurdle we have, whether it’s prescribed burningor salvage sales.

How do you take care of these litigationhurdles that rise up everywhere and add to thecost? One of the biggest cost factors we have isthose big piles of books I’ve been getting fromthe Forest Service on roadless plans and resourcemanagement plans, which are just compilationsof stuff to keep the lawyers from taking over. Idon’t know how you resolve that issue.

JOHNSON: We could keep them tied up in conferences all the time so they couldn’t file lawsuits.

WOLFE: Marc, could I ask one thing? On theprescribed burns, one of the things we need todo is continue with the education process with

the American public about the role of fire in theecosystem and the sometimes positive benefitsof fire. John, I think you mentioned earlier thatSmokey the Bear has been the icon for the ForestService: “Only you can prevent forest fires.”Why couldn’t we think about Smokey helpingto educate the American public on the positivebenefits of controlled, prescribed fires and whatit can do for wildlife habitat, increased foresthealth, and increased safety around certaincommunities? I think it’s something we need tolook at. I think the agencies, the industry, andnon-profit conservation groups should thinkabout how we get out the word about managingfire appropriately and that all fire is notnecessarily bad.

JOHNSON: John does a great Smokey theBear. We’ll have him do it again later. Jim, whatwould you tell these federal managers–LyleLaverty is sitting right behind you-about howthey should approach this part of the problem?

RILEY: I know Lyle. I have a book I’ll sendyou on this soon. Jaime mentioned restorationforestry, and I think that’s a concept that’scoming around. I came late to believing inrestoration forestry because, as a private sectorforester, I always believed that if you did forestryright, you wouldn’t need to do restorationbecause your stands would be sustainable andhealthy over time. The fact that they are out of balance and need to be restored showed that you’ve failed rather than succeeded insome respect.

But putting that aside, I believe that theconcepts there, where the science shows us thatwe have particularly high-risk stands that arevolatile and susceptible to fire and other agents,we can quickly look at those through the lens ofscience and decide what needs to be left. Youneed to look not from a perspective of whatneeds to be taken but what’s the right thing toleave on that site. With that in place, then youcan have a rational conversation about how youcan get that done. Will logging get you there?What mix of logging and other things? That’swhat we did in the Clearwater Elk Initiative. Ifyou have all that done based on science, I’mmore optimistic today than ever before that wecan arrive at those site-specific prescriptions.Then you run headlong into Brad’s excellentpoint that the process is so encumbered. Howcan you ever implement the plan? We’re there

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with the Clearwater Elk Initiative where we havean excellent plan supported by a very broad setof interests but have difficulty getting financingcarried out because of it. I think it’s going to takean Executive Office instruction or an order thatallows flexibility at the local level to implementthese decisions when they are made, even whenthere is not 100% consensus. I believe that’swhat the governors were asking for becausethat’s what needs to happen. The biggest failureof all of this would be sitting here three yearsfrom now, having had all these great ideas and alot of local conferences and collaborations, andhaving had nothing happen.

JOHNSON: Darrell, does that make sense to you?

KNUFFKE: It does make some sense to me.Again, the Wilderness Society can support theidea of restoration forestry but not unreservedly,and we come to it with some unease, based onthe salvage experience wherein we saw an awfullot of big, healthy trees taken out to make theremoval of salvage logs economic.

I’d like to see us embark on a path wherebywe simply commit ourselves to spending whatit’s going to cost to do the job, starting at theintermix and moving out. The further you getfrom where the people live, the less effective arethose treatments if human health, property, andsafety are our concerns. There are a lot of jobs inthis work, and there ought to be. That’s all to thegood, but I think that in this effort, particularlywith the head of steam it seems to have behindit, we need to separate the logs from the loggers.Hire the work done by competent professionals,hired by the Forest Service, to come in and getthe stuff out. If anything saleable results, let theForest Service sell it whether there is or isn’t amarket for it. Otherwise, I think we’re going torun the same risk we encountered in the wake ofthe salvage operation.

RILEY: Let me say this. I think this is aclimate that calls for experimentation in lots ofdifferent things, and I’m willing to say on behalfof our people that these newer ideas aboutdifferent ways to organize contracts, about howthe private sector is involved in the activities areall things we ought to explore, we ought tomonitor, and we ought to look what worked andwhat didn’t. I also think we have to be carefulabout these one-size-fits-all prescriptions. Any

forester in this part of the world goes out thereand says, “Each stand is different; each standrequires a different set of circumstances.” To try to say in a uniform fashion that we’ll dorestoration forestry as long as there is no treebigger than a certain diameter is equally as“duh” as it is to say we’re going to high-gradeand only take out the biggest and most valuabletrees. You have to look at the functioning of the ecosystem.

LITTLE: I’ve got a question for Jim Riley. Hetalked about resolving the litigation hurdles atthe end. Are you talking about a pseudo God-squad? You talked about some kind of executivedecision. This has to be a pretty powerfulexecutive. These federal courts are pretty toughto get around. How do you do that?

RILEY: I better be a little careful here. Wehave executives that think they are so powerfulthat, in a sweeping action, they can set asidemillions of acres of land without any due publicprocess. You’d think that some of that sameexecutive authority might be used to grantdiscretion to local groups and local states,particularly in light of the fact that this is anational emergency. In national emergencies,maybe it warrants and justifies allowing peopleto act in a controlled, monitored fashion andinclude experimentation. So I think that theexecutive officer of this country, the president ofthe United States, can say we’re going to grantdiscretion, under the Governor’s control, tolocal forest units to write plans and carry themout. When we’ll do that, monitor it year to year,and bypass all those paralyzing processes thatmean you don’t get anything done unless youspend $2 million and two years and have twohundred attorneys look at it for you.

KNUFFKE: I don’t think it’s a nationalemergency. It’s a national problem. We’ve gottime to make a sensible decision, and there isnever a shortage of time to make a wrongdecision. I think it would be foolish in the ex-treme to undertake any thoroughgoing changesin the way we manage our forests until we’redamn sure we know what happened in the year that is just about to pass. When you starttalking about an emergency, that often leads us to begin to think about ways to pinch offpublic participation. The roadless policy – I’mguessing you don’t like it though we haven’t

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talked about it.

JOHNSON: I think that’s a safe assumption.Accept that as a given.

KNUFFKE: Two years and a huge publicinvolvement process, so I’m reluctant to see us,under the guise of an emergency, starteliminating people’s opportunities to commentand to be involved. These are, from myperspective, our national forests and ought to bethought of that way. That does not necessarilyargue for a one-size fits all approach to theirmanagement, but they are part of the nationalbirthright and ought to be dealt with that way.

RILEY: I agree that there needs to be athoughtful process that’s open and available topeople who want to help shape these decisions,but it needs to happen in time frames that canbe concluded so action occurs on the ground.I’m not talking about overriding all of that.There’s a right amount of that, but it certainlyshould not be a process that is so stymied inendless deliberation that nothing occurs.Whether you want to describe it as a problem oran emergency, something needs to happen.

JOHNSON: Dr. Pyne, would you stand uphere for a minute? Earlier this morning, itseemed to me that you were ending where thisconversation has arrived right now. We have therange of opinions here. What do you make ofwhat they’re saying?

PYNE: Well, I’m an historian, so I tend tolook to the past rather than project to the future.I have mixed feelings about what’s going tohappen. Part of it is that we can’t parse up thebig problem into small problems. They are onlygoing to be solved on a site-specific basis, andthat’s going to be with some kind of collectiveaction. I’m also a pyromantic, not a pyromaniac.I would like to see a whole lot more fire on thelandscape, and I don’t think it’s going tohappen. I think we’re going to have veryselective areas where, because fire is anindispensable ecological component, we have tohave it in, but if all you’re talking about is fuelreduction or other kinds of manipulations thatare a lot cheaper and more risk-free devices thanfire, I don’t think that’s going to happen.

The other stakeholder that’s not here is theinternational community. Why is it so awful for

Brazil or Indonesia to burn up a million acres ofold growth forest, but if we do it in Yellowstone,it’s ecologically wonderful? All kinds of issues ofclimate change enter into it, so it’s going to bemore complicated, but I would like toreconstitute the debate.

I think the whole set of terms that we’re usingremind me of my damn word processor. It startscapitalizing, and it changes my grammar. WhenI write something the way I want it, it defaultsinto something else. I just see the whole debatedefaulting into things that will not be solved. Ifyou want to trisect an angle and you’re onlyallowed to do it with a compass and a straightedge, you’re not going to do it. You have to findanother set of devices to achieve that. So myhope is that we can somehow go back andreconstitute the discussion. I would call that astory or inventing a story or however you wantto do it.

JOHNSON: Sounds like the perspective of anhistorian. Brad Little, with regard to GovernorAndrus’s comment earlier today, how aboutrangelands? How should we think about theseissues in regard to rangelands and particularlyhis comment about getting the cows on therange to eat that grass early in the cycle andthen getting them off.

LITTLE: Well, even Chief Dombeck and Iagree that a lot of this fire problem is a fuelproblem. We’ve got a non-smoky way to takecare of the fuel problem. I was in Canada a fewyears ago, and as they’re doing here in theUnited States, they ran the sheep industry out ofCanada. In Alberta, they have classes now thatteach sheepherders how to pack a mule andlight a Coleman lantern They eliminated thesheep industry, and then people up thererunning big silvacultural operations realizedthey had to bring sheep back as a 4-Hmanagement tool. There are places in theUnited States where we are getting to that. We’rejust eliminating the sheep industry, which is agreat tool for fuel management, particularlyherded sheep, and they’re going to have to bringthem back in.

Sebastien Minaberri is paid to graze his sheepjust above Los Angeles as a fuel managementtool. I think even in the $1.8 billion, there islanguage that talks about using livestock for fuelmanagement, but the problem with cheat grass is another conference. The fundamental

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element for both forest and range is that youhave to take care of the soil, and you have totake care of the water. Everything else issecondary. If you’re going to take care of the soillong-term, you‘re going to have to do some fuelmanagement, and we think domestic livestockhas a big place there.

JOHNSON: Jaime, same question I asked JimRiley a while ago. What would you tell thesefederal land management agency heads that areputting this national strategy together? Whatought they to be focused on?

PINKHAM: I guess the irony is that, as thespeakers mantioned this morning, the warningsigns have always been out there. So has theconcerned community, but as Darrell and othershave been saying, how do we make it aresponsive community and finally light the fireunder them, so to speak, to get them to respond.I think too often we always point the fingers atthe federal land managers and say, “You’re theones to blame for the hardships of the world.”Really, we need to look at another level ofleadership here. It is our Congressional leader-ship. They’re our neighbors, and they are just asimpacted by this as we are. What do we do to getthem to help create the changes and reforms.For example, people bad mouth the EndangeredSpecies Act and its administration by the Fishand Wildlife Service, but don’t blame theagency. Look at those who wrote the law. If youwant to effect change, effect change at thehighest level possible. Congress is the place tolook. I also feel that in these kinds of debates,because of the diversity of values out there, itneeds to run through a deliberative process tomake sure we come to a right understanding.

John Gordon said one time that the greatestpotential harvest from model forests is not woodproducts but knowledge about how diversecultures and diverse politics shape our forests.He’s right on target there. We need to have theability for all the communities to come together.

The prescribed fire thing bothers me becausethe same people who fear fire in their backyardwill fear smoke in their backyards. We have aseries of laws and hoops to jump through at thestate level, the federal level, and even the triballevel in regard to air quality codes. So launchingright back into prescribed fires is going to have social impacts just like having wildfiresspreading across the community.

JOHNSON: How do we deal, Jim Riley, withroadless lands in this debate? Are we going tohave to think entirely differently about fire inroadless lands or in designated wilderness?

RILEY: Much of that 39 million acres is in theroadless lands. If you want to be honest aboutaddressing what is a region-wide problem, Idon’t think you can separate it by theseconvenient categories of things we’ve allowed toevolve over time. I don’t think it is good policyto try to look at the roadless lands in a block andto say they are uniform in some fashion andneed to be treated in some uniform way. That’spart of what really troubles me about the recentpolicy for those. When you get to looking at those roadless lands, you will find thatopportunities for environmental problems occurbecause access and certain types of managementwill not be permitted. It has reduced to zerowhat management options will exist for folksinterested in controlling fuel loadings anddensities in these stands. I have asked thequestion, and there is no part of that plan thattalks about what they’re going to do about thehigh risk of forest lands within the roadlessblocks. It is a big problem, Marc, and I think thepolicy is wrong-headed.

JOHNSON: Does someone else have aperspective on how we ought to be thinkingabout this debate with regard to roadless andwilderness land? Darrell?

KNUFFKE: I might have a point of view onthat. It will not surprise you to hear me say thatthe Wilderness Society has been very supportiveof the roadless initiative. In the context oftoday’s discussion, I think we have to look atwhat transpired in the year 2000 and concludethat roads and logging haven’t done a heck of alot to slow forest fires. This year, heavily loggedareas burned, and then the fires tended to movesomewhat slowly into roadless areas and wilder-ness areas. The fact that we can log them andpunch roads in them does not necessarily, inand of itself, get us out of this problem. $1.8billion sounds like a sack of money, and it is, butnot when set against the need. We can’t do it all.If we’re going to get the greatest effect, you haveto start at the interface and work out. Thefurther into the wildland you get, the lesseffective are treatments if protecting property iswhat’s driving it, and I think it ought to be in

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the short term. In 1994, 35% of our firefighting budget

nationally was spent protecting private property.I don’t think anyone in the room would arguethat hasn’t gone anywhere but up. Oneanecdotal report I heard from Montana was that90% of the money spent fighting fire inMontana was to protect property. One fire-fighter said, “When the fire starts, there is nobudget. You can spend $1 million to save a$50,000 cabin.” That’s the magnitude of whatwe’re talking about, and that’s why we hadbetter spend as much of that $1.8 billion as we can get our hands on and not worry for now very much about wilderness or roadlessareas. They take generally pretty good care of themselves.

JOHNSON: Other thoughts on that? Jaime?

PINKHAM: I guess I’d better put my other haton here. I also sit on the Governing Council forthe Wilderness Society. On the other hand,being educated as a forester, sometimes I findmyself getting caught professionally, but that’snothing unusual for a salmon-eating IndianDemocrat in the state of Idaho. But that’sanother conference, too.

JOHNSON: Is that a “fourfer”?

PINKHAM: No, that’s more like a “duh.”

JOHNSON: Brad, how should we think aboutroadless and wilderness in this discussion?

LITTLE: Well, as a hamburger-eatingRepublican in Idaho...You know, my ancestorsand then Jaime’s ancestors burnt in thoseroadless areas. They talk about my uncle packinga 30-30 with him so that nobody would stophim when he came out behind his sheep, justsetting everything on fire. Now they arrest you ifyou do that. They probably tried to arrest himthen. That’s why he packed the 30-30. A lot ofthese roadless areas were burnt, historically.They were burnt by Jaime’s ancestors and mine,and they were grazed. Some of those roadlessareas were grazed and grazed heavily. So boththe grazing is gone, and the burning is gone.

I disagree that we don’t have a crisis out there.I think the crisis is an environmental crisis aboutour watershed and the soils that are up there. Ithink that we do have to do something, and the

biggest impediment I see to it, as I stated earlier,is litigation. That’s going to be the question.How do we get around that? Look at the QuincyLibrary group. Look at the enormous consensusthey had in Quincy, California. That was atough deal there, and they finally had to pass alaw through Congress. I don’t know whether, forall these little different ecosystems, if I dare, as aRepublican, use the word “ecosystem,” we havethe time to pass legislation. That’s why I likeJim’s concept that we need some kind of anorder. We have to have something to operatewith a 50-50 Senate and almost a 50-50 House.There will have to be some buy-in from Darrell’sconstituency as well as Jim’s and mine. That’sour challenge, I think.

WOLFE: Marc, can I weigh in here in terms offire in some of these roadless areas? I’m going toapproach it from the standpoint of an elk-eatingconservationist. Some folks would say, “Howcan you rationalize that? How can you shootand eat elk and be a conservationist?” As an elk-hunter, let’s take the Bob Marshall WildernessArea in Montana. In Montana this summer,many of us who are elk-hunters and many whoare conservationists were saying, “You know, itwould sure be nice if the fires that wereoccurring in the Bitterroot Valley were occurringin the Bob Marshall Wilderness Area because itwould improve the habitat for elk, and it wouldimprove ultimately our opportunities for elk-hunting in the Bob Marshall.”

So some way or another, we have to makesure that we can keep fire as an importantcomponent of the roadless areas and thewilderness areas. I’m not sure how we do that,but it’s an important component and a valuableecological process. Our wildlife evolved with firein those wilderness and roadless areas. I knowthat one of the challenges we have right now, aswildlife managers, is trying to improve thequality of the habitat within some of thoseareas. So it’s important that we keep that inmind and figure out a way to keep fire in thoseareas.

JOHNSON: Another quick comment on thatsubject. I want to raise one more thing, and thenwe’ll go to your questions.

HULL: Well, all I know about is armadillos.Jim, they eat pretty good, too. I’ve tried them.From my perspective, 6% of the forest land of

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Texas is federal land. Well over 50% of theproblems that I have are on that same 6%. Someof that is wilderness area.

I can tell you what we’re going to do downour way because of the experience we’ve alreadyhad messing around with a 2-acre fire on awilderness area and seeing what happens inthose highly-populated areas. Where there isroadless, and we have about 4,000 acres thatmight be impacted by that, if we can’t drivethere and put it out, we’re going to bomb it fromthe air. We’re going to put the fires out, and Ithink you’re going to see that across a largeportion of the nation. We cannot afford to messaround with some of this stuff we talk about in our wilderness areas and other places, for that matter.

JOHNSON: Gentlemen, Governor Kemp-thorne will be here later today to give us theperspective of the western governors on thisissue, but it’s clear that the governors arearriving at one central issue, and that is moreinvolvement at the state and local level insorting out these issues. My question to each ofyou, very quickly, is how do we get thatinvolvement screwed into this process? Jim,how do county commissioners, local electedofficials, and state foresters have an impact onthese issues, which, as we’ve already said, arenational in scope?

HULL: I can tell it’s already starting tohappen. I can tell you, first off, that this B wordis something that’s very foreign to most stateforesters, that is, thinking in terms of “billions”of anything. In regard to this $1.8 billion thatwe’re talking about, the federal landmanagement agencies at Ag and Interior, areinsisting all the way along that the states be avery viable partner in this whole thing. It’salready starting to work.

Through the states and the cooperation thatwe can and must bring to all levels ofparticipation–not only just local governmentsbut all of the traditional and non-traditionalresources that are available to deal with the issuein all of our states–that’s already starting tohappen. That gives me great hope. If we look atthat $1.8 billion and think that’s going to solvethe problem, it’s not. But it’s so imperative thatwe do a fantastic job with what we have rightnow so that Congress and the Administrationcan look at that $1.8 billion as a start toward a

level that we must continue if we’re going toinvolve the entire nation and be successful.

JOHNSON: Other thoughts on local involve-ment? Jaime?

PINKHAM: I’m pretty optimistic about it. Ithink the relationship that has been createdwith the Governor’s Office has been prettypositive. When I reflect back on the floods thatwe had up in northern Idaho back in 96, I’moptimistic that the doors will be open and thatthe tribes will be walking through that door tobe a player.

JOHNSON: Other thoughts on that question?

SMALLEY: The National Wildland/UrbanInterface Fire program, which is sponsored by anumber of agencies, including the ForestService, DOI agencies, and the NFPA, offers aseries of workshops directed at local communi-ties to start redefining what those paradigms are,what those responsibilities are, in concert withthe American Planning Association, the Nation-al Association of Homebuilders, and others. It’sdesigned to move those efforts down to the locallevel for local decision-making, collaborativeplanning, creative decision-making, and creativemitigation strategies and to get people to talkabout these issues from all aspects. We’re alreadyseeing some success in a number of places, andwe just completed the first year of the work-shops. We’re already seeing builders offeringfire-wise communities, already seeing the Ameri-can Planning Association and their chaptersdoing some special planning techniques andstudies, and seeing the National Association ofHomebuilders urging all of their members toattend the workshops. It stimulates the dialogueand comes long before litigation or reaction to legislation.

LITTLE: On the question of local control onthese resource issues, I guess I have a questionfor Darrell. The biggest impediment to localcontrol is the comfort level of the nationalenvironmental organizations, to be sure theirconcerns are addressed down to being very site-specific. You get to some of these communities,you need a green card program for environ-mentalists to bring them in. What would makethe national environmental groups comfortablewith some sort of local decision-making process

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on forest health and fire management?

KNUFFKE: When you say “local decision-making process,” I think it depends on whatyou’re talking about. If you’re talking aboutlocal governmental control of national publiclands, then we’re going to have a big problemwith it. If you’re talking about the active day-to-day involvement of these people who live closeto these places, we’d be very supportive of that.I would have to offer a caution, though. Youhave suggested that the Quincy Library processwas a model of its kind. We think that it was notwhat it was cracked up to be and that there wasa good deal less to it than meets the eye. Thesuggestion that only national conservationgroups opposed the Quincy process misses thefact that just about every California-basedconservation organization also opposed it. Thereason they opposed it was that it was notinclusive. We weren’t at the table; our partnersin California, in the main, were not at the table.They had a couple of local activists from Quincy,the industry, and the county commissioners,and that’s pretty much the totality of thatenterprise.

LITTLE: I think you answered my question.

RILEY: Darrell, do you have an example ofa local, empowered, decision-making processthat has worked from the Wilderness Society’sperspective?

KNUFFKE: We’re involved in one inLakeview, Oregon, a sustained management unitthere. The successes have been prettyremarkable. The consensus has been remarkablyeasy to come to. Not everyone in theenvironmental community thinks we have anybusiness being part of that process, but we are,and we like the results so far. In our mind, whatmade it succeed is that it flowed from consensusin the community about what they wanted fromthe forests that were in their back yard. Theywant them healthy. They see them as a backdropfor economic development of other kinds andnot just for their forestry values. They do see alot of promise in value-added wood productionfrom those forests but at much-reduced levelsfrom what’s historically taken place.

Yes, there are some models, but there aren’tvery many around the country that anyone canpoint to that we think work.

RILEY: We seem to have this standard aroundthe country that I believe in local decision-making as long as it comes up with the answer Ilike. If not, it’s a bad process. A lot of people areapplying that test. But I think the answer toMarc Johnson’s question is that it has to truly bean empowered process, and it has to be able tobring finality of action. People have to be able toimplement it even if there is not 100%consensus, because you’ll never get that, giventhe fact that some people empower themselvesby being professional combatants. That’s thereality. How you get there has to be led by localgovernments, I believe.

JOHNSON: Let’s go to some questions.

FREEMUTH: There is one important group ofplayers in all this whose interests are not quiterepresented on the panel. So we’re going to startwith is a question from Dave Mills, who is along-time Idaho outfitter, and also a questionfrom Grant Simonds, who is the Outfitters andGuides Association’s executive director andlobbyist. That will start us off, and then we’ll go through either your written or stand-up comments.

DAVE MILLS: I’ve been outfitting on theMiddle Fork of the Salmon for 24 years, and wehaven’t heard any conversation about the im-pact of wildfires on recreation. I guess that’s thequestion. What’s going to happen next time?

The outfitters supported the closing of theFrank Church River of No Return Wilderness. Itwas a hard call on the part of the Forest Serviceand not a pretty picture financially for all of us,but we’ve made the most of it. From myexperience in watching how the fire was run,there were a lot of management problems, and Icould give you several examples. For instance,we use the air services, so these people werebasically out of work. Well, the Forest Servicehired them on a fourteen-day rotation, but therewasn’t a lot of communication among thevarious fire managers that made the decisions.For instance, you had professional pilots whoknew the wilderness area, and they hired theseair services. On the next rotation, a guy comesin who is the manager from Wisconsin, and hesays, “Oh, single engine places aren’t safe,” sothese guys are flat out of work immediately.Then they have to help these twin-engine pilotsthat they bring in from another part of the

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country and tell them about the landscape,besides having it filled with smoke.

JOHNSON: Dave, what’s your estimate about what the economic impact was, the dollar impact?

MILLS: I’ll have to defer to Grant on that, butit’s horrific. We work out of the town of Salmon,Idaho, and there was a major impact on the city.Another example: handling the laundry system.Keep in mind that the laundries work with theoutfitters and do a great job. Now they’rehandling the Forest Service and the fire-relatedstuff. All of a sudden, the fourteen-day rollovercomes along, and that manager brings insomebody with a portable laundry service, andour local guy is just out of work. So in the firebureaucracy and management systems, there arepeople who are building businesses on thatshort time period to service these fires, and it’san interesting false economy.

JOHNSON: The American entrepreneurialculture.

LITTLE: The old forest rangers I know talkabout the audit function that took place duringthe fire and the rehab. I’m not calling foranother GAO audit, but I do think in some ofthese situations, there needs to be-inside this$1.8 billion particularly in relation to rehabprojects where they spend more money on oneacre than they can buy the adjacent acre for-some kind of an audit function for both rehaband firefighting. You really don’t want to get inand tinker with why they’re doing it, but it sureisn’t conducive to have it happen over and over.It leaves a bad taste in a lot of people’s mouths,and that’s not in anybody’s interest.

FREEMUTH: Part II of the question, GrantSimonds.

GRANT SIMONDS: Several panelists dealt alittle bit with the wilderness fire regime. Let mejust answer Marc’s question. At the height of thefire season, we had a 150 businesses that werelocked out of designated wilderness due toclosures. That amounted to about $2.4 millionworth of lost business in Idaho. Our brethren inMontana were also impacted dramatically.

Our folks operate in ecosystems that are notnatural. We forget that about designated

wilderness in Idaho because preceding the 1964and 1980 legislation to designate, we dealt withthe 1935 policy of putting it out by 10:00 AMthe next morning. So we have this unnaturalbuildup whereby we had half a million acresburn in the Frank, and yet when we go just alittle farther north, as Gary Wolfe said about theBob Marshall, we have a different situation withthe Selway/Bitterroot, what I call the asbestosforest. You can’t get a fire to burn in the Selway,and we’re losing our elk herds quickly.

My point is that we need to keep in mind thatwhile our industry generally supports naturalecosystems, they are not natural, and we have tofind some way to bridge that gap from theseventy years of fire suppression to somethingthat will approach whatever this pre-1870 orpre-350 year forest was. As Brad mentioned,these areas have been managed, whether byNative Americans or cattle persons, and that’swhat missing in the equation for us today.

We ended up being in a position where wehad 65 business operators trying to make adecision about whether to start a trip, abort atrip, or change it. Yeah, the web sites and the E-mail were nice, and I applaud the folks I dealtwith on the phone, but we have to get betterinformation so we avoid near casualties like wehad at the Flying B on August 18th. That’s a littlenuance that I want to bring to this discussion.We fine-tuned the system after Storm KingMountain, but we have to take a look at some ofthese nuances that affect the outdoor industryand our need to get information on a moretimely basis.

FREEMUTH: Do you have a comment onthat, Darrell?

KNUFFKE: One of the things I have found alittle troubling in the wake of the fires is theextent to which we seem, yet again, willing toscapegoat the U.S. Forest Service. Since itscreation, the Forest Service has behaved, in themain, the way we in the society have told themto behave. We said put them out, all of them,leave them out, and keep them out. Now we’rebeginning to reap the consequences of that. Insome of our forests, we have ten times thenumber of trees per acre that we had 100 yearsago. If that’s not a prescription for trouble, Idon’t know what is.

If I could use an example from my neck of thewoods, a year ago last July 4th, in the Boundary

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Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, a windstormcame up and leveled a swath of trees fifty mileslong and 12 miles wide. When I say “leveled,”I’m not making this up. These things werestacked 12, 15, 20 trees deep. The question inthat part of the world is not whether it’s going toburn but when. The Forest Service was superb inthe wake of that blowdown, and it has beentremendous ever since. There has been real will-ingness in those communities, some of themright outside the wilderness, to pull together, tosettle on what’s important, and to leave the restof the baggage behind. The agency is workingvery hard to come up with a plan of prescribedburns inside the forest with the single goal ofinterrupting that swath because the blowdowncontinued outside the wilderness to the east,and there are an awful lot of homes there in the trees.

So I think we ought to be a little less eager tobeat up on the Forest Service.

FREEMUTH: Darrell, along that line, thereare a lot of federal people in this room who arereally glad they came to the conference. Wehave here at least 70 people from BLM, who arehaving their own conference, and a lot of peoplefrom the Forest Service. They have asked me toask this question: How do they avoid being setup to fail? They have all this money, but in ayear from now, if some miracle hasn’t happenedor we’re thinking too short term, then everyoneturns to them as having failed once again.They’re nervous about it; they want to succeed;there is all kinds of money there. What help dothey need so they’re not the Congressionalwhipping boy in a year for having failed?

LITTLE: I’m sure they’re going to fail. Weheard earlier figures that it’s going to take maybethree or four billion dollars a year. In some areas,they will have great successes, but in some areas,there is going to be failure. We know there is.And there are people who will say, “Look, rightthere. We gave them $1.8 billion, and theydidn’t take care of it.”

I think they’re dead on. They’re going to failbecause $1.8 billion, given the situation wehave, is not going to get it done. It is a toughdeal. I think that’s why we have to go back tothe model Marc alluded to where the localpeople have some kind of responsibility. You cansee it. $1.8 billion; what do we get for it?Somebody standing in front of a burned-out

home; it’s going to happen.

WOLFE: It didn’t take twelve months createthis problem. We’re not going to solve it intwelve months.

FREEMUTH: Is the Congressional staff in theroom hearing this? You could be of help here,you know.

WOLFE: To follow up on that, I agree. Thisproblem has been created over a period of 50 to100 years. There is not enough money in theworld to solve it in one year. You couldn’t solveit in one year if finance wasn’t even a problem.The reality is that, as a society, we tend to getworked up and concerned about issues whenthey occur, and catastrophic fires throughoutthe country are cyclical. They don’t happenevery year. They happen periodically. Whatwe’ve done is respond and get very concernedover a one to two-year period, and then it fades off.

What we have to do is recognize that thiscan’t be a one-year effort. It can’t be $1.8 billionfor one year; it has to be significant funding fora significant number of years, recognizing thatwe’re going to be working to resolve thisproblem in wet years when people are saying,“Why are you spending all this money to dosomething about forest fires? We haven’t seen amajor forest fire for ten years.” We have to keepin mind that those are cyclical and that youhave to work on the problem incrementally and constantly.

SMALLEY: We also have to remember thatwhen we get all heated up here and try to makea quick decision on things, the decisions that wemake now may impact things later on, and wecreate contradictions. Florida, for example, gotall upset about the decreasing black bearpopulation, so they instituted a statewide vanitylicense plate to protect the black bear. The extramoney from the license plates went intoprotecting the black bear. It’s ironic because theautomobile is the biggest killer of black bears inthe state. The money in this protection fund wasgoing to set aside land in the core of the statewhere the black bear habitat is so no one wouldbe able to build on it. That now means that thepopulation densities are going to be even greateralong the coast, which then puts them in hazardof hurricanes and flooding and more wildfires.

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RILEY: While most people recognize that this is a multi-year problem that we have towork through, you can’t deny, when you look atthe legislative history of the $1.8 billion, thatmembers of Congress were very serious aboutsome level of accountability. At the end of nextyear, they want to see something more than along list of the new green pickup trucks thatwere bought and parked behind the fire offices.They want to see something real in terms of a strategic approach to land management, fuel treatment, and other things. That’s what it’s about.

SMALLEY: I think you’ll see that, in part, onthe local level. If you go back to Jaime’scomment and the need for land-use planning inlocal communities and where and how they putstructures in there, that will be a local decision,and I think you’ll see some impact in that.

HULL: Since the states are somewhatinvolved in this, I’d just make one comment.Based on what you said a while ago about thenumber of BLM and Forest Service people thatare here, as I look at this, we have Rick Gale,Larry Hamilton, Lyle Laverty. If we look to thosepeople and say, “You’re going to fail,” they’regoing to fail. To the many people we have inhere that aren’t part of BLM and the ForestService, let me say we’re all going to fail if wedon’t work together to take advantage of thismagnificent opportunity we have with $1.8billion. That’s all of our responsibility, and we’dbetter get behind it and make sure we don’t fail.

FREEMUTH: The next question is going tocome from somebody who represents anotherlevel of government that’s pretty vital with thefire money and some of the Craig-Widenlegislation that’s come up. That person is JohnFoard, a county commissioner here in Idaho.

JOHN FOARD: This question is for Darrell,and it’s not county-based, but it is in a lot ofways. For the last several years, Idaho has had aprocess that is attempting, because of thegridlock on our forests, to identify some sampleprojects that might be put into place to testalternative methods of managing our federallands. It comes to a close here next week, andthe group working on it will present itsrecommendations to the Idaho Land Board.

I’m going back now to your comment on the

Quincy Library project. During its three to fouryear process, the group has attempted to involvethe Idaho environmental groups, both theWilderness Society and the other groups.Particularly in the last thirteen months, theyhave attempted to get their input and havethem at the table during this process. Thosegroups have declined to participate. Does thatmean, based on your comments on the QuincyLibrary project, that the Wilderness Society andthe other national environmental groups willautomatically oppose anything that comesforward from Idaho in this regard?

KNUFFKE: I don’t think “automaticallyoppose” is even close to accurate. No, notautomatically oppose. All we ever sought in theQuincy Library Project was a seat at the table,not just California regional groups. You’retelling me that the Wilderness Society, the SierraClub here, the Idaho Conservation League–noneof them show any interest in this process? Arethese on state lands or federal lands? Well, if wedidn’t show up to play, there must have been areason for it, but finally it seems to me we mighthave surrendered our opportunity to commentintelligently on whatever you guys show upwith. I need to know a lot more about it thanwhat you’ve just sketched out, but that doesn’tstrike me as the way the Wilderness Societytypically comports itself in these processes.We’re always willing to sit down and talk. Whatwe’re not willing to do is negotiate existing lawusually. Those processes are not the forum forthat. The process for that is the United StatesCongress. Set that aside, and let’s see what wecan come to agreement on. I’m surprised to hearyour description of that process; it’s not at alllike us.

FREEMUTH: Does anybody from the local Wilderness Society or ICL want tocomment? Craig?

CRAIG GEHRKE: I remember addressing thePublic Lands Task Force about three years ago. Itwas on a Saturday. I remember because I had tocome up with day care for my kids to go do that.Fundamental thing on the Public Lands TaskForce, from our standpoint, was that they areaiming toward state management of publiclands. We don’t support that. It’s not part of ouragenda; it’s not something we are pleased with,and we will not help the process that goes

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toward state management of federal publiclands. It’s as simple as that; we have betterthings to spend our time on.

FREEMUTH: I know something about this,but I’m not going there. Dennis, you had aquestion about this?

FOARD: One of the fundamental premises ofthis project is that it does not involve statemanagement of federal lands. It is alternativemethods of federal land management; all fiveprojects are going before the Land Board nextweek. It involves federal managers managingfederal lands and has nothing to do with statemanagement of federal lands.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Then why is it goingbefore the State Land Board?

DENNIS WHEELER: John, one of the bestways we can help the federal and state landmanagers here is for us as the public to stopsending conflicting messages to them, expectingthem to solve things. When I listened to thepanel this morning, I was kind of astonished. Ihear some saying it’s OK to create conditionsthat kill salmon through siltation or that it’seven OK in the short term to let wildlife die inuncontrolled fires if it’s going to be healthy forus to have wildlife in the long term. We’velearned as humans that, through preventivehealth measures, we can extend our quality oflife. Why don’t we take a preventive healthapproach to our forests in solving theseproblems rather than to suggest that in the shortterm, we have to let salmon and wildlife die inthe process.

WOLFE: John, if I can respond to that. If youtook my comments to mean that we thoughtthis was OK, I didn’t intend them to mean that.What I was trying to explain was that if you’relooking at the long-term impacts on wildlife,specifically elk and deer, which is what our focusis on, the long-term impacts are probably goingto be beneficial. I followed up by saying that wedon’t think that’s the way to do it. We thinkthere is a better way to do it. I just wanted toclarify that we weren’t trying to say that wethink that was OK. We wish it would havehappened in a much different way, but we thinkthat the reality is that the long-term impact ondeer and elk habitat is probably going to be

positive, down the line.

FREEMUTH: OK. Let me read a question, andthen I’ll take some hands. It seems that there isfundamental disagreement on this question:How do we reach consensus on what we’remanaging both forests and fire for: propertyprotection, habitat protection, endangeredspecies protection, community enhancement?Do we not need some agreement on thepurposes of the national forests again before wecan move ahead on this? Any reaction to that?

KNUFFKE: I would take a shot at it. I thinkthat agreement has been emerging over the lastdecade. Some of us would say that the strongestvoice for consensus is reflected in the roadlesspolicy. If you look at the numbers of Americansin the millions who commented in support ofthat policy, that speaks, I think, about strongsupport for defending our forests in somethingapproaching a natural state even though thescientists tell us we don’t know what the heckthat might be. Letting them be as close tonatural as possible, putting fire back in itsappropriate role—I don’t think we’re as far fromconsensus as the question might suggest.

The Wilderness Society has put together aforest vision. We think we ought to makedecisions on the national forests subject to thisvision. It comes down with one very significantfeature. We ought to manage our nationalforests for that range of values that haveessentially disappeared from other lands. That’sa good place to start, and that takes in many ofthe values mentioned in your question.

SMALLEY: And wouldn’t it be nice if the firesstopped at the borders of the national forestlands or the state forest lands. Unfortunately, itcan’t see those designations, and I think it has tobe a national-state-private combination thatcomes up with how these forests are managedand used. Probably the biggest challenge is toredefine what those responsibility areas are andhow those responsibilities are actually carriedout. We do a big disservice when we tell theForest Service or BLM or the county or a state orany jurisdiction, “That’s your responsibility.” Ifthe national forests and national lands are trulynational lands and belong to everyone, then it’severyone’s responsibility to look at how thesethings should be managed and used. I think thatif we somehow come up with a key to do that

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on a regional or local level, consensus or agree-ment possibility. Litigation used to be ournational pastime, but now watching litigationon television is what we like to do the best. The limits of liability should go along with that responsibility.

RILEY: I think consensus is very hard if notimpossible to obtain on these issues. You justhave to face that reality. The most surefire wayto never get consensus is to insist upon it as acriterion for moving forward. That will makesure we never agree to anything.

Let’s see what we’re talking about here. TheWilderness Society’s vision for management ofthe national forests we would disagree with as amatter of general principle. We think there areways that man can interact with the federalforest lands that mimic the processes of natureand utilize the opportunities, ways that providefor the good of the economy and the good ofmankind. I suspect we will forever disagree withthe Wilderness Society about that.

What I’m wondering if we can agree upon isthe set of lands, the 39 million acres, that thescientists tell us over and over again are beyondnatural ecological conditions because of theactivities that have occurred on them. They areover-dense, they exhibit conditions today thathave never existed before under any naturalconditions, and they are not natural stands offorests. Can we engage about a process ofrestoration forestry that we can all agree upon tobring them back within what the WildernessSociety would agree are natural conditions andwhat we would agree is a rational way to getthere? If we can get agreement there, we’ll havea much better platform on which to carry on ourhistoric discussion about this. But agreementwill come within a group of folks; it will not be consensus.

KNUFFKE: That’s probably true, and I thinkthat may be an area that would be fruitful topursue. There ought to be some things we canagree upon so long as we know darn well goingin that there are some places we will disagree. Idid not mean to suggest for a second that youought to advocate for your issues on the basis ofmy forest vision policy. I meant only to describeit as the document that governs our thinkingabout forest management.

RILEY: And certainly you didn’t expect that Iwas going to agree that the roadless policy was aconsensus policy.

LITTLE: You asked about what parameters. Ithink generally the old principle that we used touse of taking care of the soil and the water verylong term–not short spikes in one-plantcommunities because that happens to be helpfulfor one species or another–but the long term,very long term health of the soil and the watershould be the key component. Really,everything else is secondary. If it means buildinga road in there to do something to get some treesout of there to stop a catastrophic fire, if I got tosend out the poll west-wide with that questionon there, people would come back and say,“That’s correct.” The long-term health of the soiland the water for our children andgrandchildren is the most important thing.

FREEMUTH: I’d remind everyone before westop that we sort of came to consensus on howwe were going to elect the president, and wecalled it the electoral college. Maybe thatconsensus wasn’t such a good one, or maybe it was.

ANDRUS: We’re going next door for lunch.First of all, Dave Mills made the commentsabout the impact on recreation. Remember whatJim Hull said about setting aside 10% forprevention and getting more from it than hegets from the 90% for suppression. With the$1.8 billion, maybe you could divide it up withone project in each forest that would be asampling, but what Dave Mills didn’t have theopportunity to say is that the cost of fires goesclear across the whole spectrum of our economicsociety. One motel in Stanley lost $42,000 incancellations when the river was closed. Theservice station across the road stopped sellinggas. Grant could give you a list of others that Idon’t have in my head. It impacts everything, sosome way we have to come up with an answer,and we hope that’s what we’re here for today.

I had a note from a gentlemen from FEMA. Itsays that FEMA pays only for those uninsuredproperties, not the insured properties. In Idaho,the total claims paid this year were $14,000.

We’re going to have lunch now, and then I’llsee you back in here. We want to keep this thingmoving along.

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Boise, Idaho

LUNCHEON ADDRESS

Richard T. Gale Chief, Fire and Aviation

National Park Service

CECIL D. ANDRUS: Good afternoon, ladiesand gentlemen. Thank you very much forcoming in here to break bread with us. Iappreciate the participation of all the people inthe morning session. Once again, my thanks tothe Idaho Statesman and its staff. We will, in fact,have a white paper for you, but I doubt that itwill be finished by Monday.

We have the opportunity today to hear froma very experienced individual when it comes tofire. I’m going to put him on now, but we needto have you back in the other room by 1:50because we have a satellite hookup fromWashington D.C. with some Congressionalmembers, and we need to begin promptly at2:00 PM.

Rick Gale has been in the National ParkService for more than 40 years. He is a secondgeneration Park Service official, and he and hiswife have three daughters, all three of whom areemployed by the National Park Service. Doesn’tthat cause a little conflict?

RICHARD T. GALE: They don’t work for me.

ANDRUS: Rick is now the NationalCommander for Fire and Aviation for theNational Park Service, and is stationed here inBoise. He was also the Fire Commander duringthe Yellowstone fire, and I’m sure he’ll use thatsomeplace in his comments. He’s anoutstanding individual who can tell you the wayit is, has enough time in grade that he doesn’thave to kowtow to ex-governors or anyone else.He can tell it straight, and that’s the way you’regoing to hear it today. Rick Gale.

GALE: Thank you, Governor. Goodafternoon. Given the day it is, I have to digressfor one moment because nine years ago today, Ihad the distinct honor and privilege of being theIncident Commander for the commemorationof the 50th anniversary of the bombing of PearlHarbor. The reason I mention that today is thatI get a flood of wonderful memories everyDecember 7th. I haven’t really thought aboutfire this morning; I was thinking about the PearlHarbor commemoration. What an experience.More fun than Yellowstone, more rewardingthan Yellowstone.

I’m here as the third string or something forBob Barbee, the Superintendent of Yellowstonein 1988. Six weeks ago, he retired as RegionalDirector in Alaska, and when he retired, he didtwo things. He immediately moved to Bozeman,Montana, and he got a hip replacement thatprevented him from traveling, so you’re stuckwith me.

I’m going to talk about some lessons andreflections on Yellowstone, but I’m also going todo a few other things. The Governor said I couldtalk about any aspect of wildfire that I wantedto, so I’m not going to miss this chance for abully pulpit.

The first thing I would tell you is this: Mysecond favorite general, Colin Powell, sayssomething that I think is absolutely right ontarget. He says, “The role of the leader is not tobe the great organizer; it’s to be the principaldisorganizer.” I hope this afternoon to provokeand stimulate you a little bit by disorganizingsome stuff for you.

At Yellowstone, one of the things that keptme (a) sane and (b) out of trouble was the

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executive director of the Greater YellowstoneCoordinating Committee, who had to do thatabout twelve times a day. He is now the DeputyRegional Forester for the Intermountain Regionin Ogden, Utah. I’m going to ask him, when Iget through with some reflections, whether he’dlike to say something. Jack Troyer. The onlyreason I was successful at any of it was thanks to Jack

What I’m going to do is share somereflections and then share some lessons learned.I would tell you that we probably learned theselessons in Idaho in 1985, in northern Californiain 1987, in Washington in 1994, in Florida in1998, and in Texas, Oklahoma, Idaho, andMontana in 2000, and any year you want to takeback from that, we’ve been there and done that.We’re going to talk about that a little bit.

Some reflections, and here I think I’mreflecting mostly Bob Barbee’s thoughts. It wasan interesting summer as you might guess. Oneof the things we learned is that neighbors oncefriendly can become anguished and hostile. Welearned that cohesiveness can give way torecrimination and blame. Yet, during thatsummer, there were numerous acts of what Iwould call heroism and certainly thousands ofexamples of selfless cooperation. I think the firesthat summer brought out the best and the worstin human nature. We learned that goodcommunication with the public is essential.There is a corollary here. Good communicationworks very well when you’re winning. It’s anentirely different matter when you’re gettingyour ass kicked. To quote one of my colleaguesin southern California, “I’ve had a lot of difficulttimes on fires, but this is the first time I’ve hadmy butt kicked 28 consecutive days.” I had itkicked for 39.

We learned that the media is not necessarily awindow to the world. There was a lot of hype.There was even more distortion, but there werea lot of attempts at honest reporting. The thingwe learned out there–and I don’t think we’velearned it very well yet–is that we weren’tprepared to deal with the media on that scopewith that level of focus. I don’t think we are anybetter prepared to deal with that same kind ofsituation today than we were in 1988.

We also learned that there is no shortage—infact, there is an overabundance—of pundits,pontificators, and polemicists. It’s sort of likeFlorida today. Maybe that’s where they all went.

We learned once again that mechanized

equipment is not a panacea, especially whenyou sit in the Madison River Canyon, watch thefire come to the south rim of the canyon, andjump the half mile across to the north slope.Multiply half a mile by the eight feet of abulldozer blade, and tell me how many bladeswide you have to have a fire break.

We learned, once again, that during extremeor severe fire conditions, all the firefightingresources in the free world aren’t going to makeone whit of difference. They never have, andthey never will. In fact, I will tell you this—although even I had enough sense not to saythis publicly at the time–the best thing we couldhave done in mid and late August and in earlySeptember would have been to send all thefirefighting resources home except those whowere doing structural protection. How do yousuppose that would have played politically? orin the media? You couldn’t do it.

But we weren’t doing any good. I will tell youabout the day that my Co-Area Commander andI gave thirteen incident commanders theorder—because that’s what it ended up havingto be— that we were going to stop fighting fireson the internal lines. We just about had aninsurrection on our hands. If we can’t get ourbest and brightest incident commanders tounderstand extreme conditions, how do we ever expect anybody else to do that who isn’t inthat game?

We learned there, although I wasn’t smartenough to realize it then, and we’ve learnedagain that the challenges from now on out infire management aren’t in the physical sciences.They are in the social sciences. I don’t know thatwe have come to grips with that or are evenaware of that. But to me, that’s something wehave to look at. That goes across any socialscience you want to talk about, whether it’seconomics, organizational psychology, whateveryou want to get to, I think that’s where thechallenges are. Just look at the mixed messagesbetween Smoky the Bear and the message thatprescribed fires are good.

Jack Troyer, do you want to say anything?

JACK TROYER: Well, if I had to come up withmore lessons learned, they would be these. First,in the world of television, if you don’t have aprescribed burn policy that can be explainedclearly and completely in 30 seconds, then youare perceived as having no coherent policy. “Letburn” wasn’t really let burn, but that’s what

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came across. Second, in 1988, for the first time, the fire

behavior that was observed was of a muchgreater magnitude than anything we hadobserved before. We weren’t prepared for it, andit was a glimpse into the future.

Third, what happened in 1988 reallyemphasized that fire recognizes no politicalboundaries. The fire was running back and forthfrom private to public lands controlled byvarious federal, state, and local entities. It wasthe same with the aftermath and the noxiousweed problem. They don’t recognize politicalboundaries either. It underscores the need forcoordinated efforts.

GALE: Thank you, Jack. Having Jack aroundwas one of the great pleasures there. The finallesson we learned at Yellowstone, although thereare a thousand more, was that Mother Nature isnot always a gentle hostess, but she always batslast. I would submit to you that we did not learnanything new at Yellowstone. Steve Pyne’s a farbetter historian than I am, so I probably havethis quote a little wrong, and you’ve probably allheard this: Those of us who do not learn fromhistory are doomed to repeat it.

That leads me into some other topics, and I’llbe happy to answer any questions aboutYellowstone as long as you don’t get too muchinto rehab because I’ve only been there five orsix times since 1988, so I’m not going to be ableto get into any details there for you.

I want to talk about some other things. Iheard this morning–and I cringe every time Ihear it-the words “catastrophic fire season.”Having said that, I certainly recognize that one’sdefinition of catastrophe depends on whose oxis being gored. If you lost your house, that’s acatastrophe. But I would submit to you that1988 and 2000 were not catastrophic fireseasons. I say that for one simple reason. Withvery few exceptions, in both those years, thesame number of people we sent out to the fireline in the morning came back to the fire campin the evening. To me the catastrophic fire yearwas 1994 when we killed 34 people.

Here’s something I believe you can take to thebank. If we had not killed 14 of those people inthe same place and at the same time, we wouldstill be doing business as usual. We would nothave done one thing about that. The onlyreason we ever had some of these reviews, safetyawareness studies, and maybe even the 1995 fire

policy was that we had an unmitigated disasterat South Canyon with 14 individuals.

Now we react to disasters, and usually we dotwo things. First, we wring our hands, and thenwe point fingers. We’re good at doing studiesabout the disasters. You go to any firemanagement office, whether it’s state or federalor local around the country, and there is a stackof disaster review reports, gathering dust. Iwould bet you that if you looked at therecommendations, you could almost tape recordone and replay it again for the next.

So what’s wrong with this picture? I thinkwhat’s wrong with this picture is that we’relooking at the wrong thing. In addition tolooking at the disasters, we ought to look at the“There but for the grace of God...” events, those“almost” situations. We don’t look at those, andwe don’t learn from those. Yet to me, those arethe ones that will tell us the lessons learned.Why didn’t it go sour? What was the differencethere. We need to be smarter about what we arereally analyzing and reviewing here, ladies andgentlemen, if we’re really going to learn lessonsand change the way we do business in the fire game.

Now one other thing we all know but don’tdo. We learned again in 1988, we learned itmany times before, and we learned it again thisyear. During extreme or severe fire conditions,we can’t do much for the fire. Yet, we persist,each and every one of us—whether we arepoliticians, policy-makers, or practitioners–withthe myth that we can put the fire out. We don’tput the fire out in extreme or severe conditionsuntil those conditions change.

What do we do? We have severe conditions,so we adopt the same strategies and tactics thatwork well for us in normal times. Then wewonder why they are not working in anabnormal situation. We fail to understand thatwe are trying to handle abnormal conditions.We believe we can make a difference with theaddition of a few more firefighting resources andkeep hammering away, day after day after day.

Let me give you an example of that. TheDome Fire, which occurred in an infamous placecalled Bandolier National Monument in theSante Fe National Forest, was a wildland fire.New Mexico had been in a drought, and thewind was blowing. A strategy was selected thatthe review team said, given the conditions,meant it wasn’t a question of whether we weregoing to have an entrapment; the question was

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where, when, and how many people were goingto be involved. We did have an entrapment with49 people into shelters. Fortunately, there wereno injuries and no fatalities, and we burned an engine.

Now here’s my favorite quote to the reviewteam from one of the people involved in the fire.“Well, our strategy would have worked if thishad been a normal year.” We can laugh, butevery practitioner in this room has said the samesort of thing. I know that’s true because I have.We have to get smarter about this, folks. Wehave to back off and think about what we’redoing here.

I’ll probably raise a few hackles, but let’s talkabout the Clear Creek fire in Idaho. We wouldlook at the daily situation report, double theamount of resources assigned to the fire, and thepercentage of containment would go down. Inthese kinds of years, as Jerry Williams soeloquently put it, we have to do what the firewill let us do and not what we would like to do.Or as another IC [Incident Commander]colleague of mine puts it, “We’ve got to learn toback off to the best ridge, not the next ridge.”We’ve also got to learn to say, when we’rethinking about adding more resources to one ofthese bottomless pit fires, when is enough,enough? What are we doing besides puttingpeople in jeopardy and spending money?

All right. That, I hope, has stirred up a fewfolks. If I’m not, I’m missing my charge up here.

We had a lot of talk this morning and we’llhave a lot more about the National Fire Plan,which is to build off the President’s Report andthe appropriations stuff. I agree with Jim Hullthat it’s one of the most unique opportunitieswe have ever had, and we need to do it right.

Let me talk about three things, just to giveyou a snapshot of how this might work. They allinvolve wildland fires in 2000. They all involveNational Park areas, and they all involve theeffectiveness of hazard fuel reduction. The firstof these is Mesa Verde National Park inColorado, which is a pinion-juniper fuel type.Because of the threat to cultural resources andstructures, there was no way that you were goingto reduce fuels in that fuel type with prescribedfire. So for five years, they had a variety ofmechanical reduction programs, and in 2000,when the Bircher Fire hit, as it came towardthose structures, that park infrastructure, andthose irreplaceable cultural resources of MesaVerde, it laid down, engines got in there,

and they stopped the fire. Success Story Number One.

Success Story Number Two. Jewel CaveNational Monument in South Dakota. Fuel type:Ponderosa pine, typical Ponderosa pine withsuccessful suppression for 70 years. Thick. Toothick to prescribe burn. So we did mechanicalfuel reduction first to reduce some of the fuels,then we prescribe burned it twice, in 1996 and1999. The Jasper Fire, 2000. Full head of steam,the head of the fire was bore-sighted right forheadquarters and the park infrastructure. Thereweren’t any resources out in front of it becauseyou could hardly fly an airplane fast enough tokeep up, let along anything else. It hit where thefuel reduction had been done, and the head ofthe fire split and went around that park and that infrastructure.

The final success story was in Jim’s state ofTexas, Lake Meredith National Recreation Area.It’s an interesting place because it’s one of threeplaces where the National Park Service actuallymanages oil and gas resources. Never mind. Wewon’t get into that. Anyway, here grassland isthe fuel type, and they burned it in 1998 andagain in 1999. There was a fire just outside thatpark, 16,000 acres, which basically had everysingle resource tied up. There was a singleengine left. A fire started at Lake Meredith andheaded toward the town of Sandford and towardthe gas and oil field development that we hadprescribed burned. The fire came, it hit where weburned, it laid down, and one engine took careof it.

Those, to me, are the kind of success storieswe need to build on, a hundred-fold over, withthis new money we’re getting. I think we havethe opportunity and the ability to do just that,and I’m pretty danged excited about it, frankly.I’m as excited as Jim Hull is.

We are going to need to be collaborative. Youhave to understand that I’m talking aboutcollaborative here in the sense of, according tothe dictionary, “cooperating with an agency orinstrumentality with which one is notimmediately connected.” I’m not talking aboutthe collaboration definition that talks aboutgiving succor to the enemy. That’s supposed tobe humorous.

In addition to the National Fire Plan, theSecretaries of Agriculture and Interior, re-commissioned the original team that puttogether the 1995 Federal Fire Policy to look atthat. This is the 2000 edition in final draft form,

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ready to go to the two Secretaries for, we hope,their signature and adoption. I’m not going intoa lot of detail about that. Suffice it to say that theprincipal finding was that the 1995 policy issound and should continue. But it strengthensand mirrors the National Fire Plan in the senseof collaboration among the feds, the states, thelocals, and the tribes. So they are to worktogether, and I think that is an excellent thing.

Our challenge, it seems to me, is that we haveto look beyond these immediate 2001 projects.We have to look beyond hazard fuels. We haveto look beyond focusing the fire issue on theintermountain west. We need to develop a long-term, strategic plan that includes all aspects offire management across the nation and involvesall our partners.

I’m going to give you a couple of examples,and I will slightly exaggerate, but not much, foremphasis. The Olympic Peninsula ofWashington. Right here in the core, you have anational park. Surrounding that core, you havea national forest. Surrounding that forest core,the area is the responsibility of the WashingtonState Department of Natural Resources. So whatdo we have on the Olympic Peninsula? Itdoesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out thatwe have three fire management organizations,we have three discreet fire management plans,we have three separate response capabilities, andwe have three dispatch organizations. Do thepark, the forest, and the Washington DNRcoordinate? Absolutely. But are they joined atthe hip with one overall fire management planand one united response and one dispatchcenter? You know the answer as well as I do.

That, to me, is what we’re talking about whenwe talk about collaboration. It’s more than just,“Yes, we’ll work together.” It’s not just theOlympic Peninsula. That was an easy one to getto because it’s so obvious. That’s the question.Why aren’t we doing that? That’s our challenge,to do those kinds of things and use theseresources we have. We may have a billion, and it sounds like a lot money, but as SenatorDirksen said, “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking about realmoney.” Our finite resources are not maybe thefinancial ones; they are human ones. So we had better start thinking about how to use this money in the most effective, cohesive,collaborative manner.

I’m going to go back to Cerro Grande. Thatwas Jerry Williams idea, but first, I have to tell

you a story. When you get a situation like CerroGrande, you can have about three options. Youcan cuss, you can laugh, or you can cry. Butabout five days after Cerro Grande occurred, Igot an E-mail from a friend of mine who is apark ranger in Scotland. He said, “I thought yoube interested in what the BBC is playing on thisfire. The quote he sent was, ‘American ParkRanger Burned Down the Alamo.’

I’m not going to talk about whetherprescribed fire should or should not have beenlit in Cerro Grande or whether there were orwere not contingency resources or whether thestrategy and tactics after it was declared awildfire were adequate or whatever. Let’s look ata bigger picture here. If the objective was toprovide defensible space and reduce threats toLos Alamos, we went about this backwards. Weshould have started out doing fuel reduction inand around the city of Los Alamos. Then weshould have gone out to protect stuff in theSanta Fe National Forest. Step 3 would havebeen the hazard fuel reduction that weattempted to do at Cerro Grande. There are a lotof reasons why that didn’t happen, but again,we have to start working smarter, not workingharder, and thinking through what we are reallydoing here. I think we need to plan and executeevery fire management plan in a cohesive,holistic manner among all our partners. Wehave an opportunity to do that, and if we don’ttake it, we’re silly.

I’m noted for my tactical truths. I’m going togive you a tactical truth and then a strategictruth and then, if we have time, we can takequestions. Do we have time?

ANDRUS: That depends on how long it takesyou to tell the truth.

GALE: All right, here’s the tactical truth.Remember it is almost impossible to undervaluethe status quo. Think about that.

Here is the strategic truth, and it emphasizeswhat I’ve been trying to say but in a differentway. The most important principle is that thestrategy be correct. If the strategy is wrong, noamount of tactical brilliance, dogged determi-nation, superior morale, or material cancompensate. That again is what I’m trying totalk about with the big picture.

I always enjoy an opportunity to tip over theapple cart, and I hope I have provoked andmaybe even irritated a few of you. So let’s take a

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couple of questions.

ANDRUS: We have time for about threequestions. It depends on whether you make aspeech or ask a question. Who has one?

AUDIENCE QUESTION: Do you agree withthe other gentleman who said today that the10% he spent on prevention was worth morethan the 90% he spent on suppression?

GALE: That was Jim Hull, talking aboutprevention, right? Yes, I agree with that. Again, Ithink that’s working smarter. Does that mean wenever have to do anything with the 90%? No, itdoesn’t, but I think prevention is where you getthe best bang for the buck. I agree entirely.

AUDIENCE QUESTION: What do you thinkof the moratorium that was placed on prescribed

burns after Los Alamos? We held up a lot ofprescribed fires last year on national forest andBLM land. What is your response to that?

GALE: The moratorium for everybody but theNational Park Service was lifted thirty days later.It only applied to prescribed fires west of the100th meridian. The moratorium was lifted after30 days for every agency but NPS. You need toget someone from the BLM or Forest Service tosee whether they continued it for other reasons,but there was no moratorium from eithersecretary after that period of time for other thanthe NPS.

ANDRUS: Rick Gale, thank you very much. Ihave to have all of you back in there in abouteight minutes. We have a satellite hookup, butyou’re free to go as long as you’re back in yourseats in eight minutes.

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MARC C. JOHNSON: We had a very gooddiscussion this morning on the history andscience of wildfires, a review of their impacts byour stakeholders just before lunch, and somepractical words of wisdom from Rick Gale aboutfighting fires in the west, who talked about someof the lessons we’ve learned and maybe need tore-learn over and over again. We’re going toconclude our conference this afternoon with adiscussion among the folks who are chargedwith developing and implementing fire policy.

We’re extremely pleased to have theGovernor of Idaho, the honorable DirkKempthorne, with us today and we are trulypleased to have, by satellite from Washington,D.C., Idaho’s Second District Congressman,Mike Simpson, and Representative Tom Udallfrom the great state of New Mexico. It’s apleasure to have them both with us.

I also want to introduce Lyle Laverty who hasthe enviable or unenviable task of developingfor the Forest Service the National Fire Strategy

and one of his counterparts in the InteriorDepartment, Larry Hamilton, Director of theNational Interagency Fire Center.

Governor, welcome to you, sir. The WesternGovernors’ Association had a meeting in SanDiego last week. Could you begin by giving us alittle background on where the westerngovernors are coming from with regard to thisNational Fire Strategy?

GOVERNOR DIRK KEMPTHORNE: Marc,thank you very much for being down there forthat session. Governor Andrus, I commend youfor the convening of this gathering and thisexchange of good information. Lyle Laverty wasone of our speakers. The WGA had two plenarysessions, and virtually the entire first day of themeeting, we discussed the condition of theforests with regard to the ecosystem and health.Then we talked about where do we go from here,the restoration, etc.

I thought it was an outstanding presentation.



Boise, Idaho

POLICYMAKERS ' PANEL

Marc C. Johnson, ModeratorAndrus Center Board MemberPartner, The Gallatin Group.

Dirk Kempthorne, GovernorState of Idaho

Mike Simpson, CongressmanSecond District of Idaho

Tom Udall, CongressmanThird District of New Mexico

Lyle Laverty, Regional ForesterUSDA Forest Service, Region II

Larry HamiltonDirector of Fire and AviationBureau of Land Management

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I wish that somehow I could appropriately en-capsulate some of the good things that werediscussed there. I will try to touch on them, butagain, Lyle, I want to compliment you. You didvery well, and I’m looking forward to yourcomments here. Larry, I’m delighted to be with you.

In September, the Western Governors’Association had a meeting in Salt Lake City. Anumber of western governors met with theSecretary of Interior, Bruce Babbitt, and with theAgriculture Secretary, Dan Glickman. I don’tthink anybody doubts that the current forestpolicy is not working. We have just come offprobably the worst forest fire season that Idahohas ever experienced. 1.3 million acres, onebillion board feet of lumber from which youcould probably have built 100,000 single familyhomes, went up in smoke. That’s what I contendhappened to the forest policy; it went up in smoke.

The two secretaries concurred with thegovernors that the states need to be full partnersin dealing with the forest health. Language fromthat meeting was then included in the Interiorappropriations bill. That language is verystraightforward. It calls upon the secretaries towork with the states as full partners indeveloping a ten-year plan for forest health.

The WGA meeting in San Diego was acontinuation of that to see some of the progressthat’s been made by Lyle and his team. We wereimpressed with what we heard. We were alsoconcerned with some of the findings, thestatistics that have been pointed out. I know it’sbeen referenced, but here’s the GAO report,Western National Forests. “A cohesive strategy isneeded to address catastrophic wildfire threats.”This estimates that 39 million acres are at whatthey call “high risk of catastrophic fire.”

The game plan that’s been devised suggeststhat we could probably treat 3 million acres ayear. If you run your math, you could say, “Well,in perhaps ten to twelve years, we’ll havesomething that perhaps is fire safe.” Not fireretardant but fire safe forests. The trouble is thatwe will continue to have these catastrophic firesin the meantime. One of the quotes that strucka chord with me was from Wally Covington,who is a professor of the Ecological RestorationInstitute at Northern Arizona University. Hesaid, “Trends over the last half-century showthat the frequency, intensity, and size ofwildfires will increase by orders of magnitude

the loss of biological diversity, property, andhuman lives for many generations to come.”There is also concern that this report by GAOwas even conservative, that it’s many moremillion acres than has been reported.

So we now have a partnership that has beenestablished, Marc, between the states and ourfederal partners. We certainly have the attentionand support of the Administration. Thegovernors felt good about the presentationsmade by the Forest Service and by BLM. There ismuch more I’d like to discuss about this, but,Marc, do you now want to make this into a conversation?

JOHNSON: I would like to do that, Governor,with your permission. I’d like to bringCongressman Simpson and Congressman Udallinto the discussion. Gentlemen, we had a lot oftalk here this morning about the $1.8 billionthat the Congress has appropriated to deal withsome of these fire issues. Knowing what both ofyou know right now about how the nationalstrategy is beginning to unfold, are youcomfortable with the way the Forest Service andthe BLM, in particular, are establishing thisnational strategy? Mike Simpson?

CONGRESSMAN MIKE SIMPSON: I’m notsure “comfortable” is the right word. As youknow, when you appropriate $1.8 billion toaddress fire suppression, fuel reduction, andrehabilitation, what we need to see and whatCongress wants to see are solid results. We’regoing to need to see that this money actuallygoes on the ground and is doing those thingsthat, in fact, were promised to us. We need to seethat stakeholders and state and local govern-ments are involved. That’s one of things I’d liketo discuss with Lyle. Since he’s going to beimplementing this plan, how sure are we thatthe states and local governments are going to beinvolved, to what degree will they be involved,and what type of results can we expect to see outof this?

This is going to have to be an ongoingappropriation from Congress even though this isa one-time appropriation. If we don’t addresswildfires in the west effectively, we’re going tohave to appropriate more and more money. Ifyou look at the fires that have happened thispast year and in previous years, everyone wantsto point fingers, and there are plenty of places to point fingers. Congress has its share of

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responsibility and blame to take on thesewildfires. For years, the Forest Service hasrequested money for fire suppression, fuelreduction, and other things. The Administrationhas then reduced that amount, and generallyCongress has reduced that a little bit more. Overthe last four or five years, the Forest Service hadabout a15% reduction in what it has requestedfor fire suppression and fuel reduction.

Congress needs to take some responsibility forthe condition of our forests, and we’re going tohave to appropriate more money. Unless we seea cohesive strategy, why we need to appropriatethis money, what results we can expect to see,it’s going to be difficult to get it throughCongress. So I’m optimistic that when we seehow this $1.8 billion was spent, we will see somepositive results from it.

JOHNSON: Congressman Udall, samequestion, sir. How are you feeling about the waythe strategy is unfolding at this point?

CONGRESSMAN TOM UDALL: Thank you,Marc. Let me also say hello to my friend, CecilAndrus, who is out there and with whom I haveworked. I think Mike is correct on the approachCongress needs to take here. This is very earlyfor us to buy into whatever strategy andproposals are out there. We’re not even going tolearn until next week, with the publication ofthe Federal Register, which communities arebeing targeted, which ones are at the highestrisk, and how the monies are going to be spent.Until we start seeing what the communities and strategies are, it’s hard to buy into thiswhole thing.

Another point that I think is very importantto me and my Congressional District is thatthere are rural areas, which we call “forest-dependent communities”. I hate the term, but Iuse it because we’re all on the same wave length.The people who live in these communities arevery independent, and they don’t think ofthemselves as being dependent. Those commu-nities have a real opportunity to revive and growas a result of this, and I believe we can use thecontracting and fuel reduction efforts in a waythat will give communities close to the forestsome economic opportunity. I think it wouldreally help in many rural areas across the west.So I am looking for the Forest Service, the BLM,and the other agencies to organize themselves insuch a way so that there are small contracts so

that smaller operators in local communities canbe involved in this process. I think we wouldreally be missing out if this turns into aWashington-run operation.

I liked very much what GovernorKempthorne said about partnerships. We reallyneed a partnership among the federal govern-ment, the states, local governments, and in myarea, the Native American tribes, who have somereal concerns about the forests. Several of thetribes had lands burned in these fires.

So I think it’s early, but I think we knowwhere we want to go. We want to thin, and wewant fuel reduction. I think prescribed fires haveto be a part of the process. If can come toagreement and move forward, this is an area inwhich we should all be able to cooperate.

JOHNSON: Lyle Laverty and Larry Hamilton,these gentlemen are from Idaho and NewMexico, but they sound as though they could befrom Missouri. They need to be convinced.Show me the money, and show me how you’regoing to spend the money. Show us where theresults are going to be on the ground. Can yougive us today some reassurance that you’re off toa good start?

LYLE LAVERTY: Marc, a great question, and Iappreciate the comments of both congressman.I feel as though I have a whole load of hay todrop off, but I don’t want to choke everybody.

The first piece is that we really have changedbehaviors. As the Governor addressed, we havebeen working very closely with both the Interiorand Agriculture agencies and, more important,in a different relationship with the westerngovernors. Probably the first element thatmodels what we’ve been doing is this list ofcommunities that Tom mentioned. This list hasbeen generated as a result of a session that thewestern governors called in Denver, and theyaddressed the need to bring this list together. It is being generated by the governors, by the states. This is not a federally-generated list of communities.

JOHNSON: This is a list of communities thatyou governors see as being at particular risk for fire?

LAVERTY: That’s right. The conference reportspeaks about identifying these communities thatare at high risk. The real value in that will be to

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do just what Congressman Udall spoke about.We can begin to identify where we can begin tomake the investments in land treatments oractivities that will begin to address some of the issues that surfaced this morning, where we can have some targeted opportunities, again developed in collaboration, to help these communities.

We spoke to Senator Domenici’s staff the daybefore yesterday, and we talked about the list ofcommunities. As you might expect, many of theprojects for 2001, because of how this processworks, were started two or three years ago andare finally coming to the point where we canimplement those projects. We’ve racked up thecommunities. As of last week, we had thirtystates that had submitted their lists of commu-nities. Again, this is a nationwide approach, andthat was the intent of the legislation. We hadabout 4300 communities and 500 projects on avery coarse screen that we’ve been able to matchup with that list of communities.

As we work on into 2001, we’ll get into thecollaborative ideas that Governor Kempthornetalked about. We’ll begin working with statesand local communities, working with theNational Association of Counties about how wecan begin to identify targets, what opportunitieswe should be looking for.

If there is a quick take-home message, it’s thatthe behavior has changed already. CongressmanSimpson and Congressman Udall, we’re lookingforward to the opportunity to come back andvisit you next week.

JOHNSON: Larry, before Lyle has a full...

LAVERTY: Do you want some more? I havesome more.

LARRY HAMILTON: I have a couple of balesmyself. I’ll unload one of those. I’d like to goback to some things that were said this morning,and I’d like to thank Bob Nelson for talking onlyabout the Forest Service, not the BLM. I reallyappreciate that.

I’ve worked at BLM for 27 years, and I neverfelt as though I worked in a theme park. As amatter of fact, I’ve had some days when I’veactually had to pinch myself to make sure Ihadn’t gone straight to hell, and I’m hoping thisisn’t one of those days before this is over.

I’m commonly called what’s referred to as a“bureaucratic bottom-feeder,” and I really

appreciate the opportunity to come to thesurface here today and take a look around. But Ihave this urge and propensity to go back to thebottom before this is over with. But I think therewere some really good comments made thismorning, some great observations. One of themwas about the ‘95 policy and the review that wejust went through. Rick talked about that a littlebit at lunch. Another major finding in there wasthat the policy was sound, as Rick talked about,but there were 83 action items in that 95 effort.The other finding in that review is that theagencies really didn’t have the capacity orwherewithal to implement them. It’s not aquestion of not having the right policy; it’s a question of being able to implement those policies.

That brings us to the $1.8 billion that’s beenappropriated here. We think that’s a huge sumof money, one that will enable us to get a lot ofthings done. I’m actually more excited than JimHull or Rick Gale about having this money, andI think the plan we’ve put together is anexcellent start.

Another thing that was mentioned was thisnotion of leadership. Eventually, we’re going toget some new leaders here, but I’m hoping wehave an opportunity not to go through whatwe’ve had here in the last eight years, at leasthere in the Bureau of Land Management, wherewe had five different directors and no director atall in two of those eight years. That’s probablyone of the things that was recommended in the white paper, and I think that’s a great recommendation.

The other thing that’s important is to take alook at our organizations. I’m not sure we’reorganized in the most appropriate, elegantfashion. Lyle, Rick, and I work very welltogether, and I think it might be nice if we hadthe same boss so we don’t end up with theseorganizational divisive exercises when things goup the food chain and other people disagreewith our recommendations. If there is a neworganization established and someone in hereends up being the director or chief of thatorganization, I’d like to put my pitch in. I’d liketo be had of the Department of Duh. I’ll explainthat to you later, how that works.

I think the point has been made here incollaborative management. There’s an oldadage: Think globally and act locally. We need tofigure out a way to start diluting the divisivenessthat comes between us in getting the job done.

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This $1.8 billion has a lot of potential, and weneed to take advantage of it.

I have one last comment on research becausethat was talked about here today. The researchthat I would like to see some of these researchersget behind is to develop a drip torch that won’tignite if we’re not in prescription.

JOHNSON: Gentlemen, let’s talk aboutspecifics for a moment. We had a discussionabout these 500 communities that were going tobe identified soon. Thinking about Idaho inparticular, what do you think is going to happenwhen those 500 communities are identified?What actions do you expect to see on the ground to deal in the near term with these problems?

KEMPTHORNE: Marc, I would expect to see areduction of fuel load. That’s what I think this isall about. We have too much fuel out there. I cantell you that in the state of Idaho, our stateforested land is in far better health than thefederal land. We look at it on stems per acre. Idon’t know, Lyle, whether you have the chartsyou showed, but they show stands of trees in1909, 23 trees per acre, that today are up to1,000 trees per acre. We wonder why oneignition can cause this to take off?

What I anticipate, Marc, and what I expect isto see a reduction of fuel load, just asCongressman Simpson raised the point at ourmeeting of the Western Governors’ Association.I asked Lyle specifically to please put aprobability–I want a number–as to how success-ful you believe you can be in treating threemillion acres of forest land and one millionacres of BLM land. Then a year from now whenyou come back to the Western GovernorsAssociation, you can show us how successfulyou were. That’s critical.

Then the second year–because right now,there is momentum and enthusiasm–we need tosee whether we sustain this process. I think, too,that we should not waltz around it. When I talkabout reduction of the fuel load, there are threeelements to that: prescribed burns, thinning,and logging. Among different governors, you’llget different thoughts and different phrases todescribe it, but all three of those are tools thatmust be utilized. You can’t eliminate any one ofthem. That goes back to what Tom was raising,and there has to be economic benefit that willbe derived by these local communities, but we’re

no longer putting it in terms of a quota of logstaken off or how many we’re going to cut. It’sbased upon forest health. As part of thatstrategy, you have three elements, and one ofthem includes logging.

JOHNSON: Congressman Simpson, you saidearlier you had some questions for Lyle. Do youwant to pose one of these questions?

SIMPSON: What I’d like to know, Lyle, isexactly how much local discretion you’re goingto have in making decisions and how much isgoing to be decided by bureaucrats inWashington, D.C. What do you describe asinvolving state and local communities? Justadvising them of what you‘re going to do? Ordoes it involve making them part of thedecision-making process as the language of theappropriation suggests?

One of the other concerns that I have is thatreducing the fuel load requires more than justprescribed burns. It requires thinning andlogging. How much of this $1.8 billion do youanticipate is going to be used up in Washingtonor in lawsuits?

LAVERTY: I thought I might have the answer.I was anticipating the question. Then when yousaid lawsuits, it’s not in here. I guess a couple ofthings, Congressman, to go back to your firstquestion in terms of what do we mean by localinvolvement. It’s very clear. Tim Hartsell, on theInterior side, and I are working on this, and wereally believe that it’s very clear what theyexpect. It’s not just that the feds design a projectand then walk up to the county or the governorand say, “What do you think about this?” It’sactually engaging those folks early in theplanning and conceiving where we should bemaking these investments. It’s a radical way forus of doing things differently, and we are reallyconscious of that.

So as we move ahead to accomplish thiswhole task, there are several pieces that thegovernors identified in Salt Lake City. One of those was to develop a ten-year comprehen-sive plan that talks about how we are going totreat fuel conditions across the country on alllands, not just the federal lands. We do have acohesive strategy that the Forest Servicedeveloped, and Tim and I have talked abouthow we’re going to be able to expand that toinclude all the federal lands. It becomes a nice

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walk-in component that fits right into thisbroader, comprehensive strategy.

To make that happen, we have a small groupthat’s working on how we design and moveahead on the framework of that. We’ve had thegovernor’s staff, we’ve had the NationalAssociation of Counties involved, and we’reinvolving the tribes to help us begin to framehow we going to approach this. If there is amessage that comes out of this, it is that thebehaviors have changed, and we’re starting tosee that already. This work group met in mid-November and December in Denver, we talkedabout the issue, and we had a first-cut discussiondraft for the governors in San Diego last week.That group worked over Thanksgiving to dothis, and it’s really a very collaborative effort. It’snot just the feds putting together a white paperand saying “What do you think about this?”These folks have actually been involved in thecrafting and design of that.

So there are some things that are happening.The governor spoke about performance,expectations, and accountability. He askedpretty pointed questions in San Diego, like“What are you going to do?” Tim and I arecommitted to doing all we can to make sure wecome back and deliver the goods, and I wouldhope, Congressman, that I can change yourmind that this is not just a one-year shot. Weneed to recognize that this is the first of manyyears and that we can in fact show that thingsare different across the country.

I’m convinced that government is good; I’veshared this with folks, and I think we can showthat government can work well across all levelswhether it’s local or state or federal.

SIMPSON: I agree with what you’ve said. I,too, hope this is not one-year shot. What I wastrying to emphasize is that this is a one-yearappropriation and that if Tom and I are going tobe able to sell this to our colleagues back there,we need that ten-year strategy about how we’regoing to reduce fuel load on all lands. Withoutthat long-range plan, we’re going to havedifficulty selling this, but if we can put togethera long-term strategy, that gives us something tofall back on as we continue this appropriationprocess. Like you, I hope it isn’t a one-year shot.

LAVERTY: The real test for us is that we’ve seta fairly tight window to have that strategy doneby May 1 with almost a final discussion draft

ready for those folks when they come back inFebruary to Washington. We’re putting thepressure on people to deliver the goods as well. Ithink that performance is going to be absolutelycritical for all of us, not just for the feds but forthe states working together. There is a hugechunk of the appropriation that provides fundsfor the states to do some treatments on some ofthe landscapes as well, so we’re going to need toagain work collectively to make that happen.

JOHNSON: Congressman Udall?

UDALL: May I ask a followup question hereon what Mike’s been talking about? This ischanging direction just a little bit, but it seemsto me that the way we got into this over 80 or100 years has a lot to do with what’s happenedwith the population growth in the west. Wehave a writer by the name of Charles Wilkersonout there in Boulder, who talks about the lastgeneration and the “big buildup” here in thewest and about the doubling of population thathas occurred. So with these population pressuresand new people moving in, I’ll bet every daywe’re creating new acreage that’s at risk in termsof people moving into what we’re now callingthe urban/wildland interface. I’m justwondering, from the agency perspective, howmuch thought you’ve given there to where we’reheaded? Are we going to continue to createmore at-risk areas? How are we going to workthis through in terms of states and localgovernments? Each one of them has a piece ofthis problem. It seems to me that’s an issue thatincreasingly we’re going to be asked about if westay committed over this ten-year period.

HAMILTON: I’d like to take a shot at thatone. We have a fire-wise program, and thepurpose of that program is to get out in the localcommunities and talk about mitigation and theway to do things so we’re not creating theproblem over and over. It was real interestingthis summer. We had over 80 firefighters,managers, and supervisors from Australia andNew Zealand, and they were here sixty days andworked on some of these large fires. We did adebriefing with them before they went home,and they were absolutely aghast at what we doin this country, at the amount of resources weput into protecting structures. In their country,it’s a much different approach. The approachthere is that if you’re going to build or move out

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into the wildland/urban interface, the fireengine doesn’t show up there, the retardantplane doesn’t fly over, and there are all kinds ofthings you’re responsible for and have to do. SoI think we’re confronted with a mindset in thiscountry, a cultural value, that we’re going tohave to change. It will take a lot of educationand will have to start in elementary school andwork it’s way through the adult population.

I had an opportunity this summer to be outon a fire where the local fire department wasbrought out. It was an inholding on a nationalforest, and the fire department said there is noway we can protect those structures because theroads are one-way, and we can’t even turn ourequipment around in there. I said, “Have youever talked to these people about what theyneed to do?” They said, “Absolutely, we talked tothem.” I said, “What kind of response did youget?” They said, “The reason we live out here inthe first place is because of the trees. We want tolive in the trees, and if you think we’re going tocut down a tree, forget it. If the place burnsdown, guess what? We’ll go someplace else.”

That, I think, is one of our major challenges.We’ve got to start this educational effort and getthis turned around. That’s going to take us awhile to do because you’re not only talkingabout changing behavior, you’re probablytalking about changing some deep-rooted valuesin the culture.

JOHNSON: Governor, Congressman Simpsonmentioned a moment ago, let’s assume for amoment that we have lots of agreement aboutthis strategy, a lot of different buy-in from a lotof different people and different constituencies,real consensus, but we get down to the actualimplementation on the ground, and one 33cstamp on an appeal brings it all to a halt. Is thata concern? Do you have that concern? Couldthat stymie any real effort to truly move forwardon this?

KEMPTHORNE: Absolutely. We discussedthat, particularly at the Western Governorsmeeting. This all does sound good, but we knowthat there are some people who say this is notthe correct approach. Some people say weshould not cut one more tree for whateverreason. I totally disagree with that. A number ofpeople disagree with that, and it’s a very extremeposition for them to take. Yes, we have toanticipate the lawsuits, but I have to ask then

the other question. So you have one billionboard feet of timber that’s now gone up insmoke, what have we gained? You fly over whatwas a beautiful landscape, now it’s charred, andthen you can’t get in there and remove some ofthat dead timber, which in ten or twenty yearswill fall down and create a brand new level offuel load. When it burns, it will burn with suchintensity that it will sterilize that soil down tomaybe 18 inches, so what have we gained asopposed to a practical pragmatic approachwhere we go in and try to make our forests healthy?

I would also throw in one other element.There are those individuals who say, “Well, butif we lose a stand of trees, they will return. We’llsee that they will all come back.” That’s notnecessarily true with the advent of the noxiousweeds. Without that competition, here comes anoxious weed, and you have suddenly, insteadof a beautiful green lush forest and a variety offauna and flora, a monoculture. It’s a sincere andcritical problem for us. So noxious weeds needto be part of this discussion.

Isn’t it funny. You talk about lawsuits,lawyers, and noxious weeds…

JOHNSON: …all in the same sentence. Well,Lyle, you heard that discussion this morningwith some of the people who recreate and makea living off the public lands and enjoy them forall kinds of different purposes and passions, howdo we deal with that legal issue about beinghamstrung, regardless of how great your strategymight be, and stymied from doing anythingreally meaningful on the ground?

LAVERTY: If I had the answer, I probablywouldn’t be sitting here. I’m looking at someexamples we have going right now on the RockyMountains. We have a project right outside ofBoulder. We’ve been working on it for aboutthree and a half years, and it will deal with thiswildland/urban interface. It has been one ofthese very collaborative efforts with lots ofcommunity meetings. Folks have been outwalking the stands, and we’re almost at thepoint where they have each tree identified byname. We’re going to leave Susie but we’re goingto cut Johnny. It’s that kind of thing. We finallygot to a point where they came to a decision,and the community applauded the decision.

In Colorado, we have groups that appealevery project; it doesn’t make any difference

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what it is. We were flooded with comments fromthe community about why do we have to holdup? Why can’t we get on with this? I think it’sgoing to take time to start building communitysupport so people will say these are good things,and we don’t want people just stopping thesethings. We live in this great country where wecan express those kinds of opinions. Just becausesomeone doesn’t agree with us and doesn’t likethe project, you can’t just cut them off and say,“You‘re not part of this.” We have to go throughthe process. I think it’s a good process, but atsome point, as Commander Gale said, you havea make a decision and go on.

JOHNSON: Congressman Udall, let me askyou, sir. Let’s assume for a moment that we havesome consensus about using prescribed fire,maybe even thinning–and put whatever defini-tion you might on that–what do we do aboutthe question that the Governor raises here aboutlogging, cutting merchantable saw timber in thenational forest?

You have a reputation, deservedly so, withenvironmental credentials. Governor Andruswas telling us earlier, in a friendly way, abouthaving locked horns with you over a certainlittle nuclear waste depository in your state thatwe have a fair amount of interest in up here. Youcare about environmental values. Tell us how weget to the point where we actually cut sometimber if that, in fact, is part of the strategy.

UDALL: Well, you’ve raised the nub of theissues. You talk about prescribed burns, you talkabout thinning, you talk, as the Forest ServiceChief did in his letter, about 12 inches andunder. I think there is an awful lot of agreement,and there is consensus in those areas. The bigconcern of people is that a lot of the groups thatmonitor this wonder, “Is the policy we’reproposing in order to get back to the levels oflogging that we were seeing in our nationalforests in the 1980s? Is this a legitimate policytoward lowering the risk of catastrophic fire, oris this really the big lumber companies pushingit in order to get the logging levels back up?”That’s why it’s important that we move forwardin the areas where we have consensus.

Let me give you a local example from SantaFe, New Mexico. Our forest supervisor out there,Leonard Atencio, has done an incredible job. Weprobably have more people that would protestforest plans and thinning and those kinds of

things in the Santa Fe area, and he has gone outpublicly with a variety of meetings. They havetours for any citizen up in the Santa Fewatershed because Santa Fe gets almost 40% ofits drinking water from this watershed, which isat very high risk. I hope it’s on that list that iscoming out soon, and I understand it is. Whatwe need to do is have that kind of outreach bythe Forest Service, involve the community,involve all the groups, including the environ-mentalists, and see if we can’t do something thatbuilds consensus on how we go forward.

The second point that I would make is onethat has to do with the forests themselvesoverall. We got in this over 100 years, and we’renot going to get out of it in one, two, or even tenyears. We need to build in local communitiesthe constituency for moving forward with this. Iget very worried that’s the biggest task we have.

The other big task for me and Mike is that wehave put so many laws on the books about howwe manage our forests that I hear some of theold-time foresters say, “What we really need todo is move back toward active management.”We’re really being hampered by that. I thinkCongress needs to take a look at all of these lawsand see, in the light of what’s happened, whatwe need to amend, what we need to work with,and what mandate we give these federal landmanagers in the Forest Service and the BLM.

JOHNSON: Congressman Simpson, a quickcomment.

SIMPSON: I would agree with what Tom justsaid. I think you have to build the relationshipwith both the environmental community andwith the stakeholders that use the forest if we’regoing to get anything done in the long run. ButI am concerned that, even if you get the localcommunities together to agree on something,oftentimes the national groups oppose things,and a 33c stamp can stop just about anything.But we do need to start building this consensus.

I do agree with Tom that we have to reviewthe laws we have on the books that hamper thedecision-making process. More and more, thedecisions in the Forest Service and the BLM havebeen moving to Washington, D.C. and awayfrom local management. When I went out for acouple of days on the Clear Creek fire, you couldtalk to the local forest supervisors there and thepeople that actually know their forests. They cantell you what the problems are. They can tell

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you where the fuel loads are excessive and wherethey need to do some active fuel load reduction.Rather than having a national policy saying wecan cut anything smaller than 12 inches, thefacts are that in some forests, you need to cutlarge trees as well as some other small trees inorder to thin the forest out and make it more fire resistant.

So a national policy oftentimes doesn’t work. What’s so important about GovernorKempthorne’s and the Western Governors’Association’s proposal is that it involves thestate and local communities, local forest super-visors, and the people that really know theirforests. That’s what I’d like to see developedmore and more, a move back toward that type ofmanagement instead of the central control fromWashington, D.C.

JOHNSON: Gentlemen? Governor?

KEMPTHORNE: Marc, thank you. I appre-ciate what the two congressmen said. Some ofthe most frustrated people are professional forestsupervisors, the people on the ground. Theyknow what they would like to do, they’ve beentrained to manage, but they feel they have beenhamstrung because of command and controlfrom Washington, D.C.

When we talk about this work product thathas been developed by the Western Governors’Association, state foresters were really some ofthe chief designers of it. At this last meeting ofthe Western Governors’ Association, I asked thestate forester of Colorado if he was supportive ofthis product thus far. He said he absolutely wasand was one of those at the table helping todesign it. Then I asked the state forester ofCalifornia whether he was supportive. Coloradohas a Republican Administration, and wethought California, with a Democratic Admin-istration, might have a different view. They said,“No, we totally support the product thus far.” Soit’s going in the right direction.

I think we’ve identified many concerns. Animportant part about the Western Governors’proposal is a process called “En Libra,” which iscoming more and more to the forefront. It’s aprocess whereby you bring the different people,diverse people, and different views to thecommon table. If we can sit down, discuss it,actually listen to one another, and leave therhetoric outside, we ultimately begin to hearwhat the true intent is. We can find creative

ways to get there.

LAVERTY: Marc, if I could just pick up.Probably one of the most eloquent discussionsthat took place at the Western Governors was aconversation that focused on this whole idea ofhow we begin to describe and come toconsensus on what we want to leave on thelandscape, rather than being driven by going into treat this or remove that. It was great.

Governor Kitzhaber talked about some of thethings that are happening in Oregon, and hetalked about going in and about what needed to happen on the landscape. He said they hadaccomplished this objective and that objective.Then he said, “By the way, we harvested 30million board feet of timber.” That was not thedriver that took them in, but this becomes acultural change for us as a society. All of asudden, we’re no longer driven by targets. Ireally commend the governors because you folkscame across as a very bipartisan group. It wasnot one side versus the other. It was encouragingto hear those discussions. As we begin to modelthat behavior, I’m optimistic that we can do this job.

HAMILTON: I guess the one thing I’d want toadd to this is the P word: patience. We’ve seenseveral occasions on which we’re getting outahead of our head lights. One good example isin trying to identify these urban/wildlandinterface communities. The list is over 4300.Obviously, $1.8 billion isn’t going to fix all ofthose. It’s going to take a lot more effort thanthat. So we have to have some criteria and tocome up with some ways that people can buyinto the criteria, realizing that they may not beat the top of the list this year but that they’re onthe list and will get there eventually.

We need to look at ways of leveragingcapability. We’re going to get a lot more done ifwe’re working together across all the differentagencies and partners we have out there onthe land.

SIMPSON: Has there been any discussion ofstewardship contracts and allowing for thoseareas where we go in and do selective thinningand logging to receive the income off the acti-vities surrounding that thinning and logging?

LAVERTY: Congressman, we do have somepilots we’re-evaluating right now in terms of

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how that tool can work for us. That surely is onetool that fits into that broad scheme of how wecan accomplish those outcomes. But certainlyit’s on the table for conversation and discussion.

JOHNSON: Gentlemen, I want to open thisup to some of the 400 people who are here inBoise today and invite back into the discussionDarrell Knuffke, who is vice president of theWilderness Society, in International Falls andWashington. Darrell, how are you feeling aboutwhat you‘re hearing here? There’s a lot of talkabout cooperation. Does it sound good? or too good?

KNUFFKE: It sounds generally pretty goodalthough I have to say I squirm a little bit atrepeated references to the fact that anybodywith a 33c stamp can shut down the system. Idisagree with that. I think the Forest Service’sown numbers will suggest to us that timber saleshave not been much hampered by environ-mental challenges. The National EnvironmentalPolicy Act doesn’t stop much of anything. It canslow things, it can shape things, it can changethings. In the end, it’s not a tool for stoppinganything nor is it meant to be. It is meant to bea clear-headed opportunity to understand majorfederal actions. To the extent that the agenciesdo their jobs up front, appeals are essentiallymeaningless or moot. I hope that we are not atthe point where we’re about short-circuitingthose kinds of opportunities for the public oractivist organizations like mine that payattention to public lands.

LAVERTY: That was not the message that wascommunicated. I really believe that, as we lookat the new planning regs, the whole idea is tobring those conversations up front and bring asmuch closure as we can before the project getsstarted, rather than what we’ve done histori-cally. I think those kinds of discussions arevaluable because we can do that.

SIMPSON: I hope that the conversation wasnot that we want to stop public input. You doneed public input. That’s the American way. ButI can tell you that in conversations I’ve had withChief Dombeck about the Forest Service andtheir budget, one of that agency’s concerns isthat more and more and more of their budget isbeing used to settle lawsuits. I’m not talking justabout the environmental community; I’m

talking about everybody. With every decisionthey make, they’re sued by somebody.Consequently, they spend more and moremoney fighting lawsuits. That’s a concern ofmine. I’d like to see more of the money weappropriate go into forest management ratherthan into lawsuits. Maybe that means we needto have more involvement up front and more ofthe stakeholders together at the table when thedecisions are being made. Perhaps we can avoidsome of these unneeded costs.

JOHNSON: Jim Riley is here with me. Jim isthe executive with the Intermountain ForestAssociation, a major wood products associationin the northwest. Jim, how are you feeling aboutwhat you’re hearing from the policy-makers?

JIM RILEY: I’m encouraged by the enthusi-asm for more locally-driven management plansand implementation. It is my understandingthat in the $1.8 billion appropriation is arequirement for the Council of EnvironmentalQuality to come forward with some expeditedprocedures that could be made available to causethese things to happen, not without publiccomment, but in a much more expedited andstreamlined process than normally exists. Ihaven’t heard any discussion about that. Is thatin the works still? What’s the outlook for that? Itmight do a lot to address these concerns.

LAVERTY: Specifically, a group is working onthat right now with CEQ. A report is due onMonday to the Congress. A group of folks havebeen looking at that to see whether there aresome things that can be done. The folks just toldme this morning, and I got a copy of it lastnight. I’ll take a look at it. There are conversa-tions and efforts moving along on that.

JOHNSON: Ladies and gentlemen, let’s openthis up. If anyone else has a question, hold yourhand up. John Freemuth has a microphone, andwe’ll circulate.

HERB MALANY: My name is Herb Malany. Imanage 200,000 acres of industrial forest lands,and I find this whole discussion here ratherfascinating because I’ve been doing this forabout 45 years. We don’t have a fire problem onour lands. At this time, they look almost likeparks. I’ve taken very strong environmentalistsalong on tours, and when they get done talking,

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they say, “Hey, this looks good. We can livewith this.”

Then I think of the problems we have, tryingto pre-commercial thin, which is the samediscussion we’re having here, on 5,000 acres ayear and finding enough employees to do thiswork. When you start talking the numbersyou’re talking here, I find it absolutelyfascinating to consider where all these peopleare going to come from.

UDALL: I’d like to comment on that. At leastin New Mexico, I think there are some realopportunities here. We have very small ruralcommunities in northern New Mexico that arevery close to the forests. Some of them areheavily Hispanic; some are Native American.They have lived with forests for 400 years, and ifwe had the kind of investment with youngpeople that you saw back with FDR and the CCCand if you had a Job Corps and put the youngpeople out there, we could create someopportunities. You’re right, sir. It’s very labor-intensive. That’s why I said early on that weneed to design this in a way that gives thosesmall communities in rural areas theopportunity to lift themselves up as a result ofthis effort and create economic opportunities.You have to design the Forest Service contractsin a way that allows smaller operators toparticipate. You have to let the word go out acouple of years in advance that it’s going tohappen so some of these businesses can start upand grow. I think the people are out there; atleast, they are in my community. I think they’reout there; I think they’re willing to work. We’vejust got to put the structures in place and havethe Forest Service, BLM, and the other federalagencies be responsive to having it moveforward in that way.

LAVERTY: Congressman, one of the thingsthat we’ve been talking about just this last twoor three days is that we need to bring all theagencies together. Interior has a huge portion ofthis appropriation that deals with economicaction. The Forest Service has some, and we’vebeen talking about other agencies that generallydon’t come into this discussion. The SmallBusiness Administration has some incredibleprograms that we can bring to some of thesecommunities. The Department of Labor hasmoney that we could bring in for training. Itgoes back to the question of where do we find

people to do this job in an almost fullemployment economy. It’s going to beextremely difficult. We could not hire peoplethis summer because of our pay level. Wecouldn’t compete with UPS, which was payingkids $12 an hour to wash trucks. That’s thechallenge for all of us: How are we going toaccomplish the expectations of Congress andthe governors?

MATT CARROLL: My name is Matt Carroll. Iteach natural research policy at WashingtonState University. I’m wondering if this panelwould care to comment on the potential impactof the Florida Supreme Court on the actualimplementation of this plan.

SIMPSON: We’ve got our own wildfire backhere, and I’m not sure we want to go any furtherwith that. One thing that I thought was veryimportant was that in September, I askedGovernor Kempthorne to come out and testifybefore the House Agriculture Committee, whichoversees the Forest Service, because we wantedto put into the record what the WesternGovernors had negotiated with the Departmentof Interior and Secretary Babbitt. I wanted thatto be part of the permanent record, theCongressional Record, so that when a newAdministration comes in, whicheverAdministration it is, we follow through withthose plans that were implemented with theWestern Governors. It was very important to getthat into the record, and I was very pleased thatthe Governor came out and did that.

FREEMUTH: Marc, I have a written questionthat I know is on many people’s minds.Congressman, Governor, what role will theregulatory agencies play in either implementingor destroying the national fire plan byregulatory oversight?

LAVERTY: Let me try to answer that one.

HAMILTON: We’re looking forward to thisanswer, too.

LAVERTY: Part of the provisions of theappropriations bill in the conference reportprovided funds for the Interior agencies as wellas the Forest Service to finance the Fish andWildlife Service and the National MarineFisheries Service staffing to get us through the

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Section Seven consultation. As probablyeverybody in this room knows, that’s one of thehuge barriers in getting projects done on theground. This last week, Fish and Wildlife, NMFS,BLM, Forest Service, the National Park Service,and the refuge site have been coming together,and we really have closure on that. My guess isthat within the next week or so, Fish andWildlife and NMFS both will be hiring thepeople we need to get projects cleared.

What we don’t want to do is let the ESAbecome the barrier as to why we can’t do this.The real barrier is getting through theconsultation process, and that has been thepiece that Fish and Wildlife and NMFS havenever been financed to do, so we have thisincredible bottleneck. It’s almost like threadingthe needle, and I think this is going to open up.I’m really encouraged that we’re making goodprogress. We have commitment from JamieClark [Director of the U. S. Fish and WildlifeService], and she does not want this to beperceived as a barrier to implementing the plan.The message, again, is that we don’t want ESA tobe perceived as a problem in implementing the plan.

JOHNSON: Pat Shea is here, former directorof the Bureau of Land Management, now–I hateto say it in this audience, Pat–an attorney in SaltLake City. A question.

PATRICK SHEA: The question goes to theGovernor and the two Congressmen. From myexperience in Washington, I would hope youmight try to describe what we call “breathingroom.” You’ve been talking about how federalland managers need to make locally-baseddecisions, but each of us–Larry, Lyle, and othersin the audience-have then been hauled beforeCongress where your staffs are less than kindand certainly don’t give any breathing room for the experimentation you seem to beencouraging. With this $1.8 billion, how do youanticipate lessening the “gotcha” mentality that oftentimes defines the boundaries of public policy?

JOHNSON: Governor, I know this neverhappened while you were in the Senate.

KEMPTHORNE: They said I was a breath offresh air. You did good on Mountain Home. Pat,it’s a fair question, and I imagine it does happen

from time to time because of the politics. Butalso, there have been many many times–andMike and Tom have experienced this-that whenthey are out here or we’re all out in the field, wehear things from the people on the ground, thelocal foresters who take you into theirconfidence. I had a policy: you never burn them.It is a confidence. Based on that conversation,yes, it gives you much greater insight so thatwhen there’s a hearing and you have some ofthe higher level bureaucrats before you, you’re alot sharper because you’ve heard it. I’ve alwaysfelt, though, that if you burn one of those folks,the word will spread that “you can’t trust thisguy,” but if the word spreads that “He is astraight shooter and you can tell it like it is,”you’ll probably find that in the pecking order,some things have been improved because yougave them some insight. To be an effectivepublic official, if you burn someone who gaveyou some good insight, you’re going to be out ofbusiness pretty soon.

SIMPSON: I would agree with what theGovernor said. In fact, as I mentioned earlier,my Chief of Staff and I spent two days earlier outin the Clear Creek Fire. We talked to forestmanagers from all over the country, and theytold us things as we sat around and had dinner,things that were beneficial to me as apolicymaker. For example, the concern that wehave about the fact that we’re losing a lot of ourforest fire managers. We have the ones who aregetting older and will be getting out of thebusiness in a few years, but we don’t have anyyoung ones moving up into that area.

Pay was mentioned earlier and the difficultyof hiring people for these projects. Those arethings we have to be able to look at, so it wasvery educational for me to be able to just sitdown and talk to these individuals and to feelthat they had the confidence to tell me whatwas actually going on in some of these areas.

Often the money gets eaten up in thebureaucracy and never actually gets down to theforest. They don’t see their forest managementbudgets increasing, even though Congress keepsappropriating more money. I agree with theGovernor. You don’t really want to burn any ofthose people, and yet I do agree with Pat thatyou have to be respectful of the fact that thesepeople are professionals. When they’re tryingsomething, I think you have to give them someleeway. Obviously, politics gets into it

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sometimes and sometimes too often.

FREEMUTH: I have another question back here.

BILL MULLIGAN: My name is Bill Mulliganfrom Kamiah, and among other things, I’m amember of the Clearwater Elk Recovery team,and I have a question for you, Lyle. In theClearwater Basin, if you look at the GAO Reportthe Governor has there, it showed it as a redarea. The Upper Clearwater Basin on ForestService ground is the highest priority area, theworst area of the state in terms of its currentcondition from a forest health standpoint. It’smost at risk. It’s also an area where we’ve alreadylost 50% of our elk herd, and we have a very lowpercentage of calf survival now, which meansthat the premier elk herd on public lands in theUnited States is going to continue to decrease.The problem we have is that we have noopenings or younger forests, and it is an areawhere we have too many 12-inch plus trees, nottoo many 12-inch minus trees.

My question is that, in looking at the newNational Fire Plan, I was really alarmed becausein the priority system, the Upper ClearwaterBasin is the lowest priority of all because it is awet forest, a forest advanced in age. Because it isa wet forest, it has a very low fire frequency.What are you going to do to help us in that kindof fuel type? It doesn’t fall into the wildland/urban interface. We don’t have local commu-nities there except really small communitiesthat apparently don’t meet the criteria forcommunities in danger from that standpoint.The population is too low. How come thoseareas aren’t being addressed by the National FirePlan? I’m concerned that the $1.8 billion will goto other areas, and we will sit there and have thefuel continue to accumulate in that area and notdeal with it. Can you do something to help us?

LAVERTY: R. Really an excellent question,and maybe I can start by going back to the GAOreport the Governor mentioned and its focus onthese lands that were at high risk. When webegan to develop a response, we took a look atthose short fire interval landscapes andconcluded that would be the first round ofresponse for us. As you pointed out so well,many of the areas we’re talking about werebeyond that; it’s that fire regime 3, 4 and 5situation, rather than the 1 and 2, where this

wildland/urban interface has taken place. Whenwe put our response together, though, weidentified three categories that we felt weneeded to look at with the investment intreating fuels. The first one was communities.We identified habitats, and we identifiedwatersheds that we needed to target in order toaddress these high-risk situations.

The immediate question that came out afterthe fires was what are we going to do withcommunities? I think for the long term, we arevery definitely involved in how we begin tomeet those habitat needs. In Colorado, we’reconsidering how to integrate some of the otherprograms as well in this strategy so that we canbegin to treat some of the habitat. The largestelk herds in the country are in Colorado, andwe’re really serious about how to make thosekinds of investments. Even though with this$1.8 billion, there is high interest in theCongress about how to help communities, wealso have opportunities with other programaccounts to target other areas, such as the oneyou pointed out in the Clearwater Basin.

I can talk to you some more about what we’redoing in Colorado.

JOHNSON: We’re going to lose our satellitehere in a few minutes. The congressmen willfade away into the ether, and we don’t want thatto happen without giving them an opportunityfor a final thought. I’d like to go around realquick, maybe starting with you, CongressmanUdall. What should we take away from thisdiscussion today? What is the big theme that weshould be focused on as we think about wherewe’re going with these fire policies? What wouldyou have us focus on?

UDALL: Well, I would say the big themeought to be patience. We need to look at thissituation in terms of history: how we got intothis, what happened in the 1910 fires with themillions of acres that burned, how we changedfire policy as documented by Stephen Pyne,what impacts occurred as a result of logging andgrazing, and how the Native Americans, withtheir close ties to the land, utilized fire forhundreds of years until government andreservation policy forced them to abandon thattool. It’s all part of a big picture, a pageant thatbrought us to today. We have to put our mindsto it as we’ve done here.

I think these western governors are great to

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have spoken out, and I appreciate Mike’s gettingit in the Record because we need to buildconsensus, we need to be patient, and it takes awhile to turn things around. That would bewhat I draw from this, and it’s important that wegive our managers the ability and time to do this job.

JOHNSON: Congressman Simpson, a finalquick thought from you.

SIMPSON: I would agree with everythingTom said. I would also say that what I hope tosee is that when we look at how we’ve used this$1.8 billion, we will have used it productivelyand be able to use that as a selling point tocontinue to manage our forests. As Tom said,this is something that has been building up forthe last 100 years. It’s not something thathappened just during the last eight years. WhatI would like to see in the future is to have ourforests become healthier, more fire-resistantthan they currently are. We have 47 millionacres that are in Category 3 fire potential. Willwe have reduced that number of acres? Whathave we done to make a healthy forest?

I’d also like to see us address what we havementioned here earlier: the urban/wildlandinterface. It will occur more and more as morepeople move out into the country to build acabin or home in the middle of trees becausethey want the trees around it. There will be someproblems there. I talked to an insurance agentwho said they were getting calls from peoplewhen the fire was on the ridge above theirhomes, asking for fire insurance. Obviously,they couldn’t get that done. We need to addressthis issue of how we’re going to solve thewildland/urban interface because more andmore of our fire resource dollars are going toaddress that problem. Consequently, it’ssomething we have to look at. I hope we willend up down the road with forests that are morefire resistant and are healthier than theycurrently are.

JOHNSON: Governor, I give you the last word.

KEMPTHORNE: Thank you. CongressmanUdall, I’m glad there are no hard feelings on thenuclear waste. All we were trying to do in Idahowas get all the Colorado waste out of Idaho andover to New Mexico.

I appreciate what our congressman have said,

and it’s nice to have teams like that back there,people that are so receptive and so on top ofthese issues. We can agree that we all wanthealthy forests. Maybe that’s as far as we canagree, but we have that as a beginning. Thenthere is scientific evidence that would stronglysuggest that in the near future, we will continueto see catastrophic forest fires. Therefore, Ibelieve the logical question to ask is what can wedo to try to eliminate that?

We’ve outlined a game plan, and part of thatgame plan must have measurements so thatthere can be accountability. It will be at theWestern Governors’ Association meetings. It willbe before House committees, testifying beforeCongressman Simpson’s committee, beforeCongressman Udall, etc. Those measurementshave to be there. But I believe that we have inplace and have identified the individuals thatare going to raise the issue, decide where theforums will be, where the venues will be. Add tothis a healthy atmosphere where consensus canbe built. That is achieved by bringing the diversegroups to a common table so that people don’tfeel left out. We’ve demonstrated time and againthat works. They may not agree with the finalresult, but they will say, “We had our day incourt.” As long as we can keep it in that courtand not the legal court, we’re all better off.

JOHNSON: Thank you, Governor. I’m goingto turn the microphone over to the Chairman ofthe Andrus Center, the former Governor andSecretary of the Interior, Cecil Andrus.

CECIL D. ANDRUS: Thank you. Before welose Mike and Tom, let me thank you verymuch. I know you can’t see us, but we can seeyou, and we appreciate very much your beingwith us today via the satellite. I know that,having spoken with both of you, it was yourintention and desire to be here with us, butfunny things have happened this fall, and it’snot over yet.

SIMPSON: It’s still our wish we could be there.

ANDRUS: Well, both of you keep watchingout for us, will you, on both sides of the aisle?Thanks again for being with us today, andGovernor Kempthorne, thank you very muchfor being here today. Thanks to Lyle and Larry aswell. I hope we’ll come out of here with some

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suggestions. A white paper will be delivered to you.

Also, I know, Mike, that you have a whitepaper, and I’ll see that you have one, Tom, fromour June meeting. It also covers some of thethings that Larry talked about, perhaps thepossibility of bringing the resource agenciesunder one umbrella, one guidance. With that,thank you very much, gentlemen, for being with us.

We have time for a couple of questions, andthen Leon is going to make four or five minutesof comments on range fire and range health, aproblem that was probably not covered insufficient depth earlier today.

GENE BRAY: I’m Gene Bray, and this is aquestion for Governor Kempthorne. We touchedon this briefly this morning, and I cansummarize it by saying partnership is a two-edged sword. I wonder, in your position with theWestern Governors’ Association, are the westernstates and their governors inclined to supportfuel reduction activities right across public landsand onto private lands that are similarlyoverloaded? Also, would they also support landuse changes, zoning, and building code changesto prevent placing more acreage and more newprivate dwellings at risk over the ten-year life ofthis program? If we keep adding to thatinventory, $1.8 billion a year is not going tocover it.

KEMPTHORNE: With regard to private land,I think we can identify what an objective maybe, but we have to respect private propertyrights. This is something we discussed. The factof the matter is that when we look at the 39million acres that are at high risk, those arepublic lands. We also discussed that state landsand private lands also need to be examined inthe same light, respecting private propertyrights, respecting the sovereignty of the states.My contention is yes, you can find exampleswhere maybe there is as much overgrowth, butin many of the private lands, as was evidencedback here, there have been thinning andprescribed burns. Yes, we all need to be in this,but we need to respect sovereignty lines as well.

ANDRUS: Thank you very much, Governor.I’m going to excuse you. I appreciate yourcoming from the office. I know you have over a hundred legislators clamoring at you to

do something.

KEMPTHORNE: Please, can I stay here?

ANDRUS: Feel free to stay. We appreciate yourbeing here. Thanks again.

Before this crowd leaves, I want Leon to havethe opportunity to visit a very, very importanttopic for four or five minutes with regard torange fires. We have a tendency to talk aboutforest fires and trees, and many things have tobe done on the range out there as well.

LEON NEUENSCHWANDER: Thank you verymuch, Governor. I’ll tell you a little bit aboutrangelands. It has to be really a little because Idon’t know all the issues on rangelands. Ihaven’t been working down there on thoseissues for about three or four months.

The first thing I want to tell you is a storyabout cheat grass. Do you all know the storyabout cheat grass? In the olden times, I’m toldthat there was no cheat grass here. It was bunchgrass and sagebrush, and we had sage grouse. Alot of the sagebrush in this country was winterrange for deer. With frequent fire, every time afire comes through, it kills some of the grass andkills the sagebrush. Historically, that grass wouldgrow and the sagebrush would come back. Theintroduction of a weed from Eurasia called cheatgrass has changed the fire story. The fire story isCatch 22. As you get more fire and as thosenative grasses and sagebrush are killed by thefire, in its place comes cheat grass. The cheatgrass spreads out and becomes more uniformand makes a field much more conducive tohaving the next fire. And of course the next firekills more bunch grasses and sagebrush, andthen we get another fire. As this gets more andmore filled with cheat grass, the intervalsbetween those fires becomes shorter and shorterto the point where it kills the sagebrush before itcan produce a lot of viable seed. It gets so thickthat it competes with the sagebrush and bunchgrass seedlings, and pretty soon we have lots ofcheat grass. This cycle ends only in the story ofhaving more and more and more cheat grass.

The BLM has recognized this problem quiteadequately I believe, and they have attemptedmany things to try to change this fuel bedbecause the bunch grasses are needed for grazinginto the fall, well beyond the cheat grass, whichis an annual, dries up, and doesn’t produce verymuch forage. Of course our sagebrush and

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bitterbrush are the browse for our mule deer andwere really important on this former winterrange that we call Boise.

Now the rest of the story is that the sagegrouse depend on the sagebrush, which is nolonger there. Now we have to go to the R periodhere because traditional fuel treatments don’twork. I don’t think there are enough chain sawsin the room to go out and mow down all thatcheat grass, certainly not every year.

Then we get to one of the alternatives thatshows some promise to stop the fires. It’s calledgreenstripping, which means planting perennialgrass, which means usually crested wheatgrassor one of its varieties along the highways to helpreduce the frequency of fire. It’s had mixedsuccess in its results, but at least it’s one effort.Catch 22. Removing one exotic grass, cheatgrass, and planting another one, crestedwheatgrass, is not necessarily a popular activityin this part of the world.

Let’s go to another quick issue. Let’s talkabout juniper. Over many of our range lands inIdaho, Washington, Utah, and Nevada andother places, we are seeing the encroachmentand density of juniper increasing across ourrangelands. Many of these junipers, young smalltrees, would have been burned by the fires,keeping the rangelands open for sagebrush,bunch grass, and bitter brush and creating awonderful winter and summer range for wildlifeand livestock. Well, as juniper becomes thick, itshades everything out and stops the fires to thepoint where they burn into the juniper, nolonger kill it, and die down. When the fires stop,the junipers continue to grow and shade outeverything underneath it. It becomes very bare.

Some time later, the juniper becomes so thickthat when a fire comes, it burns through thecrowns of the trees, creating the same set of fireproblems we’ve already talked about. The resulton the juniper is to burn them when they’reyoung or wait until they get very old and thinthem out.

Again, the most important part of trying toreduce these fires is figuring out where the firesare most likely to start. That’s along roads, alongright of ways, and around houses. Well, that’s it.

ANDRUS: I’d like to express my personalappreciation to the Idaho Statesman, to Margaretand Carolyn, for being here, for helping tosponsor what I think has been a very productivesession today. We will come up with a whitepaper, similar to the June one, that will sum-marize and make recommendations for theenhancement and health of the range and the timberlands in Idaho and the westernUnited States.

Let me speak just one minute toward the Junewhite paper. Note the recommendations onpage 5. Let me tell you, from personal experi-ence, the easiest time to make change in thepublic arena and bureaucracies is at the verybeginning of a new Administration. I speak fromexperience because I was there – Darrell remem-bers – when the Department of Energy wascreated. It would never have been created hadPresident Carter not said, “It shall be created,”and he gave all of his incoming cabinet officialsthat charge: “You shall do this.” At Interior, wegave up a lot of different ingredients that wentinto it. At that point, you can accomplish someof these things that won’t happen if you wait sixmonths because the internal bureaucracy takesover, and the protection of personal turfbecomes much more important than what theboss says at the cabinet meetings.

So I would urge you, take a look at this whitepaper. Take a look at the one that will come outof this meeting. I hope we will have a newAdministration soon. Duh. I don’t believe I’ll goany further.

I want to express my appreciation to youpeople who are here today because you care. Ifyou didn’t care, you wouldn’t be here. We haveto do something to stop these little individualcivil wars and litmus tests about how pure youare, how pure I might be, and come together tofind consensus on some of those proposals thatwill improve the life we enjoy here.

With that, thank you very much for beinghere. Margaret and Carolyn, thank you verymuch for the newspaper’s involvement. I askyou to continue to be involved because you’reour vehicle for educating the public.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you very muchfor being with us today.

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Boise, Idaho

PARTICIPANTS

Cecil D. Andrus: Chairman, Andrus Center forPublic Policy; Governor of Idaho, 1987 to 1995;Secretary of Interior, 1977 to 1981; Governor ofIdaho, 1971 to 1977. During his four terms asGovernor of Idaho and his four years asSecretary of Interior, Cecil Andrus earned anational reputation as a “common-sense conser-vationist,” one who could strike a wise balancebetween the often-conflicting conservation anddevelopment positions. That reputation resultedin part from his pivotal roles in the passage ofthe Alaska Lands Act and the National SurfaceMining Act of 1977 and in the creation of theFrank Church River of No Return WildernessArea, the Snake River Birds of Prey Area, and theHell’s Canyon National Recreation Area. Hegrew up in logging country where his fatheroperated a sawmill, and he attended OregonState University until his enlistment in the U. S.Navy during the conflict in Korea. Following hisreturn to Idaho, he worked in the northernIdaho woods as a lumberjack and helped operatea sawmill in Orofino. He was elected to theIdaho State Senate in 1960 at the age of 29.During his years in public service, GovernorAndrus has championed local land-use planninglaws and protection of wild and scenic rivers,and he helped engineer a comprehensiveagreement between industry and conservationto assure the protection of Idaho’s water quality.He elected not to run again in 1994 andsubsequently established the Andrus Center forPublic Policy to which he donates his service aschairman. The Center is located on the campusof Boise State University. His awards includeseven honorary degrees, the William Penn MottPark Leadership Award from the National ParksConservation Association, Conservationist ofthe Year from the National Wildlife Federation,the Ansel Adams Award from the WildernessSociety, the Audubon Medal, and the Torch ofLiberty award from B’Nai Brith.

Margaret E. Buchanan: President and Publisherof The Idaho Statesman. Ms. Buchanan earnedboth a B.A. degree in marketing and an M.B.A.in finance from the University of Cincinnati.Upon graduation, she worked for CincinnatiBell and IBM. In 1986, she joined the GannettCompany as a general executive for theCincinnati Enquirer. Preceding her move to theStatesman, Ms. Buchanan served as presidentand publisher of the Star Gazette in Elmira, NewYork. She is active in the Boise community andserves on the boards of the Boise Chamber ofCommerce, Fundsy, the Idaho ShakespeareFestival, St. Alphonsus Medical Center, and theYMCA Foundation. She and her husband, Greg,have two sons.

John C. Freemuth, Ph.D.: Senior Fellow, AndrusCenter for Public Policy and Professor ofPolitical Science and Public Administration,Boise State University. Dr. Freemuth’s researchand teaching emphasis is in natural resource andpublic land policy and administration. He is theauthor of an award-winning book, IslandsUnder Siege: National Parks and the Politics ofExternal Threats (Univ. of Kansas, 1991), as wellas numerous articles on aspects of naturalresource policy, including five recentpublications: “The Emergence of EcosystemManagement: Reinterpreting the Gospel,”Society and Natural Resources (1996);“Ecosystem Management and Its Place in theNational Park Service”, Denver Law Review(1997); “Science, Expertise, and the Public: ThePolitics of Ecosystem Management in theGreater Yellowstone Ecosystem” (with R.McGreggor Cawley); Landscape and UrbanPlanning (1998); “Understanding the Politics ofEcological Regulation: Appropriate Use of theConcept of Ecological Health,” (Proceedings ofthe International Conference on EcosystemHealth); and “Roadless Area Policy, Politics and

Wilderness Potential,” International Journal ofWilderness (with Jay O’Laughlin), (April 2000).He is the author of three Andrus Center whitepapers on public land policy, based on Centerconferences in 1998, 1999, and 2000. He hasworked on numerous projects with federal andstate resource bureaus, including the ForestService, Bureau of Land Management, andNational Park Service at the federal level and theDepartments of Fish and Game, Parks andRecreation, and Environmental Quality of thestate of Idaho. He also serves as chairman of theBureau of Land Management’s National ScienceAdvisory Board. In earlier years, Dr. Freemuthhas been a high school teacher and seasonalpark ranger. He holds a B.A. degree fromPomona College and a Ph.D. from ColoradoState University.

Richard T. Gale: Chief, Fire and Aviation,National Park Service. Mr. Gale is a secondgeneration National Park Service employee. Hebegan his NPS career in 1958 and served in anumber of western national parks, usually inpark ranger positions. He was assigned to theNational Interagency Fire Center in 1988 and tohis current position in 1994. He was one of theoriginal National Incident Commanders in 1985and one of four National Area Commanders in1995. He also served for seven weeks as the AreaCommander in Yellowstone National Park in1988 and was the Incident Commander for therecovery effort from Hurricane Andrew for foursouth Florida national parks in 1992. Mr. Galeholds a B.A. in history from California StateUniversity, San Francisco. He has threedaughters, all of whom are third generationNational Park Service employees and areinvolved with wildland fire management.

Ross W. Gorte, Ph.D.: Senior Policy Analyst inthe Natural Resources Section of theCongressional Research Service. He joined theCRS as an analyst in 1983. In his currentposition, Dr. Gorte provides objective, non-partisan data, information, and analyses onexisting federal policies and on proposedchanges in policies and programs for themembers, committees, and staffs of Congress.The specific issues he addresses include federallands and resources; multiple use and sustainedyield; wilderness and other managementsystems; timber management, taxation, andtrade; and appropriations, finances, and

economics of federal land and resourceprograms. Dr. Gorte has a B.S. in forestmanagement, an M.B.A. from Northern ArizonaUniversity, and a Ph.D. in forest economics fromMichigan State University. His doctoraldissertation was on fire effects appraisal. Heworked as an economist for the National ForestProducts Association in Washington, D.C. from1979 to 1982. In 1991, he took a sabbatical fromthe CRS to direct a study of Forest Serviceplanning for the Congressional Office ofTechnology Assessment.

Larry Hamilton: Director of the National Officeof Fire and Aviation for the Bureau of LandManagement. Earlier in his career, Mr. Hamiltonwas state director of Montana and the Dakotas,associate state director for the BLM’s EasternStates office in Virginia, and director of theBLM’s National Training Center in Phoenix. Hehas also held positions in Washington, D.C.,Alaska, Nevada, and Colorado. Dr. Hamiltonholds a Ph.D. from the University of Denver andcompleted undergraduate work at CaliforniaState University in San Francisco. His honorsinclude the Department of Interior’s MeritoriousService Award and the President’s Award forOutstanding Leadership. He has served on theInteragency Grizzly Bear Committee and thesteering committee for the Interior ColumbiaBasin Ecosystem Management Project. Larry andhis wife, Kniffy, have two grown children, Ginaand John.

James B. Hull: A 33-year veteran of the TexasForest Service and a graduate of the School ofForestry at Stephen F. Austin State University,Mr. Hull has extensive experience in all areas offorestry, especially forest management, policy,and wildfire protection. In June of 1996, he wasselected by the Texas A&M Board of Regents tobecome the seventh State Forester of Texas. Asdirector of the Texas Forest Service, he isresponsible for all matters pertaining to forestryin Texas, a vast statewide responsibility not onlyfor the Piney Woods of East Texas but also forurban forestry, tree insect/disease control, andrural fire protection in all 254 Texas counties.Mr. Hull provides leadership on numerousforestry boards and organizations at the state,regional, and national levels and serves aschairman of the Fire Protection Committee ofthe National Association of State Foresters. Hehas received a number of prestigious awards

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throughout his career, including theOutstanding Public Service Award from theNational Association of State Foresters andelection as a Fellow in the Society of AmericanForesters. He is married, has two married“Aggie” children and four grandchildren.

Marc C. Johnson: Boise partner of the GallatinGroup, a Pacific Northwest public affairs/issuesmanagement firm with offices in Boise, Seattle,Portland, and Spokane. Mr. Johnson served onthe staff of Governor Cecil D. Andrus from 1987to 1995, first as press secretary and later as chiefof staff. He has a varied mass communicationsbackground, including experience in radio,television, and newspaper journalism. He haswritten political columns and done extensivebroadcast reporting and producing. Prior tojoining Governor Andrus, Mr. Johnson served asmanaging editor for Idaho Public Television’saward-winning program, Idaho Reports. He hasproduced numerous documentaries and hostedpolitical debates. Several of his programs havebeen aired regionally and nationally on publictelevision. He is a native of South Dakota andreceived a B.S. degree in journalism from SouthDakota State University. His communityinvolvement includes a past presidency of theIdaho Press Club and the Bishop Kelly HighSchool Foundation and service on the Boards ofDirectors of the Idaho Humanities Council, theSt. Vincent de Paul Society, and the HousingCompany, a non-profit corporation devoted to developing low-income housing projects in Idaho.

Dirk Kempthorne: Governor of Idaho andChairman of the Western Governors’ Associa-tion. Elected to the governorship in 1998,Governor Kempthorne has been chosen by thecitizens of Idaho to serve at every level: Mayor ofBoise from 1985 to 1993, United States Senatorfrom 1993 to 1999. Since his inauguration asgovernor, he has put forward an ambitiousagenda to improve Idaho’s public schools, earlychildhood development, and immunizationrates. During his term in the U.S. Senate, hewrote and won passage of a bill to end unfundedfederal mandates on state and localgovernments. He served on the Armed ServicesCommittee, the U.S. Air Force Academy Board ofVisitors, and the Helsinki Commission, a NorthAmerican/European international human rightsmonitoring group. Prior to his years in public

service, Governor Kempthorne worked as PublicAffairs Manager for FMC Corporation. He is a1975 graduate of the University of Idaho wherehe earned a degree in political science and waselected student body president. He has receivednumerous honors, including the IdahoStatesman’s “Citizen of the Year” award, theGuardian of Small Business award from theNational Federation of Independent Business,the Public Service Award from the Association ofMetropolitan Sewerage Agencies, Legislator ofthe Year Award from the National HydropowerAssociation, and the Idaho National Guard’s topcivilian honor, the Distinguished Service Medal.He and his wife Patricia, an outstandingadvocate for children in her own right, have twochildren, Heather and Jeff.

Darrell R. Knuffke: Vice President for RegionalConservation, The Wilderness Society,Washington, D.C.

Mr. Knuffke oversees the work of the Society’seight regional offices, works with grass rootsorganizations, the general public, and the mediaon wilderness protection programs. He joinedthe Wilderness Society in 1985 as regionaldirector in its Denver office. After a decade inthat post, he served as western outreachcoordinator before assuming his presentposition in 1997. Prior to coming to the Society,Knuffke worked in Washington, first as presssecretary for a U.S. Senator from Colorado, thenin the Interior Department during the CarterAdministration. A Colorado native, he studiedjournalism at Denver University and worked at anumber of Colorado community newspapers asboth reporter and editor before going toWashington. His wife, Barbara West, is anational park superintendent. Knuffke splits histime between International Falls, Minnesota andWashington, D.C.

Lyle Laverty: Regional Forester for the U.S.Forest Service’s Region II, which includesColorado, Wyoming, Kansas, Nebraska, andSouth Dakota. He will soon have a new title,following his recent appointment to direct theNational Fire Plan. Before becoming RegionalForester, Mr. Laverty was a senior executive inthe Forest Service’s Washington, D.C.Headquarters Office after moving there from thePacific Northwest Region. Mr. Laverty’s firstassignment with the Forest Service was in timbermanagement on the Six Rivers National Forest

in Orleans, California. From there, he went tothe Bear Springs Ranger District on the Mt. HoodNational Forest and then to the SkykomishRanger District on the Mt. Baker-SnoqualmieNational Forest in western Washington. He wassupervisor of the Mendocino National Forest inNorthern California from 1983 to 1987. A nativeof California, Laverty received a B.S. degree inforest management from Humboldt StateUniversity and a M.A. in public administrationfrom George Mason University. His hobbiesinclude skiing, hiking, and biking. He lives inColorado with his wife, Pam, and they are theparents of two grown children, Lori and Chad.

Brad Little: President, Little Land and Livestock.Mr. Little owns and oversees a cattle, sheep, andfarming operation in southwest Idaho. Inaddition, he has found time to devote his talentsand a large amount of time to a great number ofcivic, business, and charitable enterprises. He iscurrently chairman of the American LandResources Foundation, which educates thepublic about the biological, economic, andcultural benefits of livestock grazing, and theIdaho Association of Commerce and Industry.He is a past director of the Idaho HeartAssociation and a past chairman of the IdahoBusiness Week Foundation and the Public LandsCommittee of the American Sheep Industry. Hehas served as a member of the National Wild Horse and Burro Study Committee, the University of Idaho Vet School AdvisoryCommittee, the Idaho Fish and Game BearManagement Task Force, and the Public LandLaw Review Committee of the WesternGovernors Association. He also serves as adirector of the High County News Foundationand the Idaho Community Foundation. In thelast five years, Mr. Little has spent a considerableamount of time meeting with national livestock,political, and environmental leaders to resolvegrazing controversies. Mr. Little graduated fromthe University of Idaho and lives in Emmettwith his wife, Teresa, and his sons, Adam and David.

Robert H. Nelson, Ph.D.: Professor ofEnvironmental Policy, University of Maryland,School of Public Affairs. Dr. Nelson’s particularexpertise is on land and natural resourcemanagement with an emphasis on managementof federally-owned resources. He is the author ofseveral journal articles and five books: Zoning

and Property Rights (MIT Press, 1977); TheMaking of Federal Coal Policy (Duke UniversityPress, 1983); Reaching for Heaven on Earth: TheTheological Meaning of Economics (1991);Public Lands and Private Rights: The Failure ofScientific Management (1995); and, mostrecently, A Burning Issue: A Case for Abolishingthe U. S. Forest Service (2000). He has written forbroader audiences as well, including theWashington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Forbes,the Weekly Standard, Reason, Society, andTechnology Review. Nelson has served in theprincipal policy office of the U.S. Secretary ofthe Interior, the senior economist of theCongressionally-chartered Commission on FairMarket Value Policy for Federal Coal Leasing,and as senior research manager of the President’sCommission on Privatization. He has been avisiting scholar at the Brookings Institution,visiting Senior Fellow at the Woods HoleOceanographic Institution, and visiting scholarat the Political Economy Research Center.

Leon F. Neuenschwander, Ph.D.: Professor ofForest Resources at the University of Idaho andnationally-recognized expert on fire andrestoration ecology, Dr. Neuenschwander is alsoAssociate Dean for Research and InternationalPrograms at the University’s College of NaturalResources. He teaches graduate courses inwildland ecology, prescribed burning, and firemanagement and ecology. His recent and cur-rent research includes fire effects and processesin forest ecosystems, restoration of fire de-pendent ecosystems, regeneration of forest andrange important species. Dr. Neuenschwanderearned his B.S. and M.A. degrees at CaliforniaState University and his Ph.D. at Texas TechUniversity. He has taught at the University ofIdaho since 1976. Author of more than 50journals, a book, and many popular fire articles,he frequently testifies before Congressionalcommittees, is often quoted in the media, andworks to help journalists prepare accurateaccounts regarding fire in natural resourcemanagement.

Jaime A. Pinkham: Member, Nez Perce TribalExecutive Committee. Mr. Pinkham was electedto the NPTEC in 1996 and currently chairs theBudget and Finance Subcommittee and theEnterprise Board. He has been president of theBoard of Directors of the Intertribal TimberCouncil since 1994 and serves on the Governor’s

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Council of the Wilderness Society, the ColumbiaRiver Intertribal Fish Commission, and the Trustfor Public Lands Indian Lands InitiativeAdvisory Council. Past board service includesthe American Indian Science and EngineeringSociety. He worked formerly for the WashingtonState Department of Natural Resources and wasstaff forester in fire management for Oregon,Washington, Idaho, southeast Alaska, andwestern Montana for the Bureau of IndianAffairs. He holds a B.S. degree in forestmanagement from Oregon State University andcompleted a two-year leadership program at theWashington State Agriculture and ForestryEducation Foundation.

Stephen J. Pyne, Ph.D.: Professor of Biologyand Society Programs, Arizona State Universityat Tempe. Dr. Pyne is also the author of a dozenbooks, mostly on fire. His most widely knownare Fire in America: A Cultural History of Wildlandand Rural Fire (1997) and World Fire: The Cultureof Fire on Earth (1995). Two more are scheduledto appear next summer: Fire: An Introduction willsummarize his view of the principles that havegoverned fire’s geography and dynamics sinceits origins, and Year of the Fires, a narrativehistory of the Great Fires of 1910 and how theyshaped America’s fire policies and programs. Dr.Pyne was born in San Francisco but grew up inPhoenix, which he considers his home town.Shortly after high school, he began working ona forest fire crew at the North Rim of the GrandCanyon, to which he returned for a total offifteen summers and from which experience allhis writing stems. He received a B.A. fromStanford University and an M.A. and Ph.D. fromthe University of Texas at Austin. He taught atthe University of Iowa before joining the facultyat Arizona State University in1985. His awardsinclude the Robert Kirsch Award from the LosAngeles Times for a living western author ”whosecareer contributions merit body-of-workrecognition,” the ASU Alumni Award forResearch, a B. Benjamin Zucker EnvironmentalFellowship at Yale, a MacArthur Fellowship, andthe Theodore Blegen Award from the ForestHistory Society. In 1998, he was DistinguishedVisiting Professor at the University of Albertaand was named a Fellow of the AmericanAcademy of Arts and Sciences in 1995. He is aprolific writer, and his published articles,interviews, monographs, reports, and essaysnumber in the hundreds. At this moment,

fourteen articles and two books are in progress.

James S. Riley: Chief Executive Officer,Intermountain Forest Association (IFA),headquartered in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho. IFA’sfocus is on advancing scientifically-basedforestland policies that promote activemanagement compatible with environmentalstewardship. Among IFA’s accomplishmentsunder Mr. Riley’s leadership are: a voluntaryconservation planning program for small privateforest landowners in Montana with endangeredfish species concerns; a Citizens ManagementCommittee program to manage reintroducedgrizzly bear populations in the Selway-BitterrootMountains of Idaho; land stewardshipcontracting approaches to the management offederal forest lands; and completion of thecommunity-based “Flathead Common Ground”forest management plan for portions of theFlathead National Forest in Montana. Hisprofessional affiliations include the ForestIndustry Labor Management Committee, theIdaho Forest Products Commission, theUniversity of Idaho Policy Analysis Group, theAmerican Forest and Paper Association, and thePend Orielle Lake Watershed Advisory Group.He has also provided expert testimony andanalysis on forest resource policy issues tonumerous Congressional committees andmembers of Congress. Mr. Riley completed hisgraduate and undergraduate studies in forestmanagement and economics at Utah StateUniversity. He currently resides in Hayden,Idaho where he is active in community andfamily activities.

Mike Simpson: U.S. Representative from Idaho’sSecond District, Congressman Simpson has justbeen re-elected to his second term in the Houseof Representatives where he serves on theAgriculture, Resources, Transportation, andVeterans Affairs Committees and on sixsubcommittees. Prior to his election toCongress, he served fourteen years in the IdahoLegislature and three terms as Speaker of theIdaho House of Representatives. During thattime, he was appointed Vice Chair of theLegislative Effectiveness Committee for theNational Conference of State Legislatures. Healso received the Boyd A. Martin Award from theAssociation of Idaho Cities for exceptional con-tributions benefiting Idaho city governmentsbecause of his diligent work to pass legislation

stopping unfunded state mandates. MikeSimpson attended Utah State University andgraduated from Washington University Schoolof Dental Medicine in St. Louis. He began prac-ticing dentistry in Blackfoot in 1978 and hasrecently received the Idaho State Dental Associ-ation President’s Award in recognition of out-standing service to ISDA and to the people of Idaho.

James C. Smalley: Senior Fire Service Specialist,National Fire Protection Association, located inQuincy, Massachusetts. Mr. Smalley managesthe National Wildland/Urban Interface FireProgram, an initiative that providesinformation, research, training, and educationmaterials concerning the severity and impact ofwildfires that threaten homes and otherstructures. From 1983 to 1992, he managedseveral programs for the NFPA relating towildland and wildland/urban interface fires andproduced video programs on firefighter safetyand fire behavior in interface areas. He spentweeks covering the 1987 fires in southernOregon, northern California, and Yellowstone.While working for the U. S. Fire Administrationin Washington, D.C., he managed a nationaltechnical assistance program in fire protectionand fire service planning. Previous to his work atthe national level, Mr. Smalley served as directorof the Arkansas State Fire Training Academy andworked for fire departments in three Arkansascities. Mr. Smalley holds an A.S. degree in FireProtection and a B.S. degree in Education. He is a member of the American Planning Associ-ation, the Society of American Foresters, theInstitute of Fire Engineers, and the Society ofFire Protection Engineers.

Tom Udall: U.S. Representative from NewMexico’s Third Congressional District, Congress-man Udall serves as a Democratic Floor Whip.Born in Tucson, he earned his B.A. degree atArizona’s Prescott College. He studiedinternational law at Cambridge University inEngland, where he received a Bachelor of Lawdegree in 1975. In 1977, he earned his J.D. fromthe University of New Mexico Law School. Priorto entering the political arena, he served as a lawclerk for Chief Justice Oliver Seth of the TenthCircuit Court of Appeals, Assistant U.S. Attorney,

and Chief Counsel for the New Mexico Healthand Environment Department. Following a five-year tenure as partner and shareholder with theAlbuquerque law firm of Miller, Stratvert,Torgerson & Schlender, Congressman Udallentered the race for New Mexico AttorneyGeneral and was successful. He served in thatcapacity for two four-year terms and was electedpresident of the National Association ofAttorneys General. The congressman has servedon the boards of the Santa Fe Chamber MusicFestival and the Law Fund, a regionalenvironmental public interest law firm. Hecomes from a family distinguished for itsdevotion to public service. His father, StewartUdall, served in the U.S. House of Represent-atives from 1954 to 1960 and subsequently asSecretary of the U.S. Department of the Interiorduring the Kennedy and Johnson Administra-tions. His uncle, Morris Udall, representedArizona in Congress from 1961 to 1991, servingas chairman of the U.S. House InteriorCommittee for 14 years. Congressman Udall ismarried to Jill Z. Cooper, a former New MexicoDeputy Attorney General, and they have one daughter.

Gary J. Wolfe, Ph.D.: President and CEO of theRocky Mountain Elk Foundation. Dr. Wolfe wasborn in central Texas and grew up inAlbuquerque, New Mexico. He attended theUniversity of New Mexico where he received aB.A. degree in chemistry in 1971. He laterobtained an M.S and Ph.D. in wildlife biologyfrom Colorado State University. Before joiningRMEF in 1986, Dr. Wolfe spent 12 years atPennzoil Company’s 500,000-acre Vermejo ParkRanch in various capacities, eventually servingas vice president and general manager. While atVermejo, he was responsible for managing oneof the southwest’s largest elk herds and directedNorth America’s largest private land elk-huntingoperation. Dr. Wolfe received the New MexicoWildlife Federation’s Conservationist of the Year Award in 1978, Ducks Unlimited’s“Distinguished Service Award” in 1983, and theNorthwest Section of the Wildlife Society’s“Wildlife Administrator of the Year Award” in1991. He and his wife, Rita, enjoy hiking,camping, hunting, and fishing as their primaryrecreational activities.

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Cecil D. Andrus, Chairman

John C. Freemuth, Ph.D., Senior Fellow


P.O. Box 852, Boise, Idaho 83701

208.426.4218; Fax 208.426.4208

E-mail: [email protected]

S P O N S O R S

American Forest Resources Council

American Forests

Bechtel BWXT Idaho

Boise Cascade Corporation

Bracke & Associates, Inc.

Coeur d’Alene Mines

Elam & Burke

Hawley Troxell Ennis & Hawley LLP

Idaho Conservation League

Intermountain Forest Association

Perkins Coie LLP

Potlach Corporation

Skinner Fawcett

Stimson Lumber Company

Trout Unlimited

Trout Unlimited, Idaho Council

Weyerhaeuser Company

Wilderness Society

USDA-Forest Service

USDI-Bureau of Land Management

USDI-Fish and Wildlife Service

USDI-National Park Service

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